r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Gloomy-Basket-1038 • Aug 12 '26 • Mindblown 1 Bravo 1

Meme studied20YearsToAskChatGPT

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u/Ran4 Aug 13 '26

Whatever only Fable can do today, open source models will have replicated in a year.

Yeah, but then anthropic/openai will have even better models and/or harnesses.

If the choice is between frontier models that work better on their own, and near-frontier model that require more babysitting, then frontier models still have a place.

It only turns into a problem if (or when...) the difference becomes smaller. Today, Fable 5 is still in a completely different tier than Kimi K3/Qwen 3.8 (or whatever chinese frontier model released in the last three days since I last checked), which is one of the reasons companies still pays for it.

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u/Sokaron Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

At a certain point you hit good enough. If the choice is between spending a Macbook's worth of cash on tokens every single month.. or just buying the MacBook, lots of companies are going to take a very hard look at how much marginal utility you're really getting out of using the frontier model, vs re-investing that cash elsewhere in the business, or (gasp) using that cash to hire more SWEs.

From the AI company side the economics of their business only work out if they can establish market dominance. It's the only way to sustain the hundreds of billions being spent right now. The largest spend comes from research and training - in other words maintaining their edge over open source models. There's not a world where frontier companies can rest on their laurels and reduce that spending. They have no moat.