[luckylion]

That's not what GP was saying though. To stay with that analogy, the assertion was that "all processors are kinda the same, there's no real qualitative difference", which sounds pretty strange. It's somewhat accurate if your use-case is covered by the average processor and the faster one doesn't benefit you. They're not equal, but all of them surpass your needs.

> If I need more capability or results are substandard, I can always upgrade

You wouldn't be able to upgrade (and see improved results) if the model you use today was close to equal to the top of the line.

[no_wizard]

That wasn’t the assertion. The results - not the models themselves, not strictly speaking their over all capabilities - if they have no meaningful improvement by moving to a newer model, why then would I want to switch if I’m not getting any tangible improvement in results?

[luckylion]

> The big companies in this space doing the research are not making leap over leap with each release, and the downstream open source projects are coming closer to the same quality or in fact can produce the same quality (e.g DeepSeek or LLAMA) hence why it’s becoming a commodity.

This was the assertion. "Open source is close/equal in quality", not "open source is enough for plenty of use-cases, not everyone needs the top of the line".