Businesses are shifting easier tasks to open-source models because frontier AI doesn't justify the cost. The bull case for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic depends entirely on whether the economy can absorb a flood of super-intelligent AI agents fast enough.
I don't think it's a question of how far ahead the closed source models are.
I actually think it's just a question of how good of a model do I need for my task? And it is true that like a lot of software engineering, white collar work in general does not need like Fable 5.1 asterisk level intelligence. And so I think a lot of businesses, especially the ones who are like lower gross margin businesses, are very rationally making the decision to start offloading some of the easier tasks to these increasingly capable open source models. I think this is going to continue like happening in the future. And so then the question of like, are the frontier labs a durable business model? Like really just comes down to your belief on whether or not sort of the space or TAM of new things that you can do with increasingly smarter frontier intelligence will outgrow the portion of tasks that are being offloaded to these cheaper models. And I actually think this is kind of the biggest difference in priors between people who are bullish Frontier Labs, which is people who are super bullish open source. It's like if you were to magically spawn 100 million super intelligent PhDs who are experts in every field, who also don't need to eat or sleep or anything, do you think the economy would be able to absorb that relatively quickly and still get high ROI? Or do you think fundamentally, The world's just not that intelligent as we've all imagined. I think reasonable people have very different priors on this, but if you believe that the answer is yes to that question, you're bullish OpenAI and Anthropic. If the answer is no, you probably think we're going to have a recession relatively soon, and you're really bullish together.
Yeah. Interesting, man. I'm motivated to ask the question because I've been using so much Perplexity Computer in Slack recently, in particular using GLM 5.3 because of all the refusals on anything cybersecurity related from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Making it impossible to do my work. And so, I needed to use GLM 5.3, and I think that led to me discovering that, yeah, it's pretty good for a lot of stuff.
