It's easy to agree to that, but you're disregarding that the resources you spend on the stronger model could be allocated elsewhere. Conversely, you're assuming that spending more on AI will always yield better results and be worth it, compared to spending the money on other things.

This might actually still hold true now, or or at least many actors in the market behave that way. But I'm not so sure there isn't a cliff to that effect. At some point, if SOTA models remain expensive, it'll turn into a market advantage to figure out how to get things done without depending on the most expensive tooling available.

Similar scenario, different phrasing: if your company relies on overqualified workers to deliver 100% quality, the market may still decide that it's fine to go with 90% quality for 50% the price.