> I feel like you underestimate the degree to which AI developers are influenced in just the same ways as everybody else.
I feel like you're overestimating that. I work every day on developing LLM-based products, use them a lot while developing those, and have been doing so since November 2022 (beta release of GPT 3.5). So I should be a prime representative of the demographic you're talking about.
When a new frontier model is released, I run a series of tests, play around with it, and decide whether or not to use it based on that. Anything else would be ridiculously stupid, leaving either cost savings, product quality improvements, or development velocity increases on the table. We're not talking about databases or cloud VMs where there's a big switching cost. It's changing a model string and provider, so frictionless that it's a no-brainer.
We actually have some data that's on my side. Take a look at OpenRouter's model usage statistics. Note how OpenAI mmodels make up a tiny share on there, despite having more general mindshare on social media than all other model providers combined. Their data also shows people are very quick to switch when improvements to price/performance are released.
It's a bit like how vacuum cleaner specialists never use Dysons despite them having the most mindshare and overwhelming marketing budget. Regardless of vacuum cleaner specialists also just being normal people. Even if this one doesn't hold in your region, there's countless of these examples.