> For nearly all tasks, I want the fastest and smartest AI model.

This is not nearly true for everyone else in the world.

For example, think about the world in ~2021 pre-LLM. Would anyone say the sentence "I only want the fastest and smartest humans working on my project"?

No of course not. Most people don't want to pay $10 million dollar salary to the best programmers in the world. They prefer to pay $200k salary to a median programmer and that's good enough for their ecommerce website.