> power users would be mostly running their own models
...with a fair amount of supervision, while frontier models would be running circles around them using project-specific memory and on-demand training (or whatever we would have by then).
Those will be great for projects that look just like everybody else's. That's not a knock. We'll see plenty of new systems built by anyone who needs one.
If you're building something groundbreaking and new, the advantage will be slim to none.
If what you refer to by “on demand training ” is fine tuning, it's going to be much more efficient on a small model than a big one.
Honestly right now it's mainly stagnation in frontiere model capabilities. Most of the recent afvancemdnts are towards generation speed, compression and tool usage. The quality of the models are not improving at the same rate as before. I doubt this big gap will continue, given that open source and especially chinese labs keep pushing well documented frontiere papers.