What happens when these companies decide to start increasing the cost/token, exceeding the cost of hiring an engineer or paying for an external service in the first place?
0. "The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year." https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought
So, same end result (cost exceeds hiring a new engineer), but achieved differently.
The counter, I suppose, is the managers have to deal less with engineers telling them their ideas aren't good or well thought out.
1.) open weight models gain more popularity 2.) i'm making more money from these models than paying for them
if either happens, then I'll feel good about it either way
What do you mean? They need to recover hundreds of billions in sunk costs?