There will always be tasks that are withing reach of whatever the SOTA models are, but not of the cheaper, perhaps locally runnable ones. It seems that already people are finding Qwen 3.6 27B sufficient for many coding tasks (the llama.cpp author is now using it exclusively).

As models get better and smaller, I expect that we will rapidly (within a year?) get to the point where SOTA models are not needed for the vast majority of coding tasks, and even today it seems many people are just using them for the planning phase.

How many people drive Ferraris vs Fords? How many people driving a Ford would, on a utilitarian basis, be any better off driving a Ferrari?

So far there seems to be mainly two high volume use cases that have been found for LLMs - coding and business flow automation, and it seems neither of these need SOTA models. I wonder if there will continue to be enough market demand for massive expensive SOTA models to make them worthwhile developing?