[boringg]

I think the payment model is still not there which is making everything blurry. Until we figure out how much people have to pay to use it and all the services built on its back it will remain challenging to figure out full value prop. That and a lot of company are going to go belly up when they have to start paying the real cost instead of growth acquisition phase.

[jebarker]

I don’t think a payment model can be figured out until the utility of the technology justifies the true cost of training and running the models. As you say, right now it’s all subsidized based on the belief it will become drastically more useful. If that happens I think the payment model becomes simple.

[mmargenot]

There's enough solid FOSS tooling out there between vLLM and Qwen3 Apache 2.0 models that you can get a pretty good assistant system running locally. That's still in the software creation domain rather than worldwide impact, but that's valuable and useful right now.