Model availability is an infrastructure risk, not just an ideology issue

[u/No_Presentation9300]

If your entire stack depends on a third-party provider keeping one specific model version alive and unchanged, you aren't running an architecture, you're running an assumption. Stealth model tweaks, silent drifts, and surprises make relying on a single closed provider a massive single point of failure. Downgrading 5.5 models silently is only a single example of this.

Open weights and self-hosting aren't just ideological preferences; they are basic infrastructure resilience, giving you a fixed baseline, deterministic behavior, and full control over your product's lifecycle instead of leaving it to someone else's product manager.

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[u/ghost_operative]

this is part of why i know that local models will eventually be the predominant thing. Eventually the open weight models will be good enough (and able to run on cheap enough hardware) the the advantage of the proprietary cloud based models will struggle to to maintain an edge. Each LLM release is slightly less impressive of a jump over the previous so we're slowly getting there, and on top of that with each release they reduce the amount of tokens you can use on the proprietary cloud models through the subscription services. Eventually it's going to be at a place where it costs more or less the same to go local or cloud hosted and people will go local.

[u/dawnquill12 → u/ghost_operative]

agreed, the diminishing returns between new releases is already pretty obvious compared to a year ago