Right now you are right -- even if I ran my local LLM all day, the quality is not nearly as great, and it runs slowly -- so I use the tier one AI subscription services as they are faster and smarter. But that might only be true for a limited amount of time, and a limited number of circumstances.

To borrow your steam engine analogy, if local LLMs get as good as a Toyota Prius, even if OpenAI / Anthropic offer Ferraris, most people will be happy with their Prius as their daily driver.

Similarly, if the big labs start raising prices or cutting usage, you won't be able to use it as much as you want -- whereas a local LLM will run all day every day without costing you any extra money.

So right now you are right, but who knows how long that will last.

I drive my 2018 car to work these days. It is good enough.

> For nearly all tasks, I want the fastest and smartest AI model.

This is not nearly true for everyone else in the world.

For example, think about the world in ~2021 pre-LLM. Would anyone say the sentence "I only want the fastest and smartest humans working on my project"?

No of course not. Most people don't want to pay $10 million dollar salary to the best programmers in the world. They prefer to pay $200k salary to a median programmer and that's good enough for their ecommerce website.

I mean people said this all the time, but wouldn’t pay for it (as you said), couldn’t recruit for it, and definitely couldn’t retain them.

But so many teams said they wanted to Raise the Bar to infinity and hire a World Class Team.

This will change when out of control billing gets noticed. Then us devs will, I presume, get token rations.

I can see my new Thursday afternoon "oh chit" moment being that I didn't complete my weekly task because i torched all of those tokens M-W doing task/ticket grooming using the hot hot model instead of the dodo model with jira mcp connector :D

I think a scooter or a bus is a more apt comparison than a steam engine. The scooter and bus can both get the job done with some acceptable trade-offs, depending on your circumstances and what you’re willing to accept.

However, there are many use cases where they aren’t the right tool for the job.

I find this too. In fact, recently I've been pushing more and more to the latest and greatest model every time there is an update. It just saves me so much headache.

Genuine ELI5 question: in this metaphor, which "old" models are steam engines at this point? Which are Model Ts, etc.