[chadash]

I pay for hosted databases all the time. It’s more convenient. But those same databases are popular because they are open source.

I also know that because it’s open source, if I ever have a need to, I can host it on my own servers. Currently I don’t have that need, but it’s nice to know that it’s in the cards.

[epups]

Open source databases are SOTA or very close to it, though. Here the value proposition is to pay 10-50% less for an inferior product. Portability is definitely an advantage, but that's another aspect which I think detracts from their value: if I can run this anywhere, I will either host it myself or pay whoever can make it happen very cheap. Even OpenAI could host an API for Mistral.

[chadash]

> Here the value proposition is to pay 10-50% less for an inferior product.

OpenAI just went through an existential crisis where the company almost collapsed. They are also quite unreliable. For some use cases, I'll take a service that does slightly worse on outputs, but much better on reliability. For example, if I'm building a customer service chat bot, it's a pretty big deal if the LLM backend goes down. With an open-source model, I can build it using the cloud provider. If they are a reliable host, i'll probably stick with them as i grow. If not, I always have the option of running the model myself. This alleviates a lot of the risk.