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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe models will be commodified because each model is unique with strengths and weaknesses. Its not like Steel which is more or less the same no matter where you purchase it from.

If what you said were true, you would hardly see people complaining about the quality of Opus 5 or good writing from Sol. But people do.

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> Its not like Steel which is more or less the same no matter where you purchase it from.

I’m not an expert in metallurgy by any means, but this seems really off. There are many recipes for steel and varied processes that also impact the final product.

> I don't believe models will be commodified because each model is unique with strengths and weaknesses.

They are all converging.

The same level of intelligence gets roughly 10x cheaper per year. So you might both be correct where a large part are commodity tasks but frontier is hard and valuable and not commodities.

This depends heavily on what the use-case is. Yes, if it's a coder making software and having to read LLM output then writing style matters. If the LLM is used in an automated data processing pipeline with a capped level of complexity, entirely different aspects matter and LLMs become more interchangeable.

Steel has different varieties like carbon steel, alloy steel, stainless steel, and tool steel.

Each of those categories then has different grades of quality.

Tokens are a lot more like steel than oil, especially since a lot of tokens are used as structural material in the form of code.

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