> I'm a small software business owner in Europe. I have to assume my competition is willing to pay for any business advantage they can get. And so I also have to pay for the SOTA model, whatever it is.

If you make money from doing anything like "produce software with as little human involvement as possible", then sure, you need SOTA models. In that case, though, the value you add is very little and you probably don't have a sustainable business.

OTOH, if you make money by getting clients to pay for features, there is very little difference in time-savings from using Anthropic/OpenAI SOTA over GLM-latest.

IOW, if you business can only make money by one-shotting software, you probably don't have a business in the first place.

Regards, another small business owner.

The good news (for you and most everyone other than the current leading AI companies), the gap between the SOTA and the near-frontiers is getting smaller every week or two. The leading Chinese models are only a few months behind now (GLM 5.2 tickles the tail of GPT 5.3 or 5.4 and Opus 4.6, according to benchmarks and the vibes among heavy users who've spent some time with it), where they were a couple of years behind a year ago.

No you don't; it's often overkill to use the SOTA models. People want SOTA because it's shiny, but there are a lot of tasks where it's cheaper and more efficient to use other models.

This is a great recipe for going out of business.

I don't know if you write software for your own products or if you code for your customers. Anyway, are you going to compete on the speed of your code writing AI or on deploying the features your customers need? One useful feature is better than a hundred ones nobody really care about. And a good relationship with customers is better than any feature.

Example. Yesterday I listened the technical lead of a customer of mine digging himself into a hole by not understanding what it would mean exposing AWS EFS to their on premise server over NFS. It was just too many unknown unknowns for him and he had no time to ask the AI (and even if he did I'm not sure that he could understand.) His boss, which actually used NFS, had to stop him. I didn't speak a word.

So, he could have coded the migration of a server from AWS to on premise, asked Claude to write also all the configuration scripts and policies but then what?

What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs?

For businesses where this is true, they also need to be able to switch provider quickly in case the best provider changes.

It's almost identical to the possibility of one model getting shut down for a business that doesn't care about SOTA.

This thinking that every task must be stuffed into the most 'advanced' (expensive) model out there is idiotic, and it's not only you unfortunately.

At $JOB I have warned higher ups we should try to keep our expenditure under control, educate people that document slinging doesn't require Fable every time and demo the capabilities of the cheaper models, and been snubbed for it. When Fable is available once again our bill is going to be eye watering, relative to what it should be.

If you can't figure out what model to use your business is already dead.

Unless you have concrete evidence via evals that SOTA is actually needed, you’re just buying into the hype.

do you think your current operation and niche is so optimized that not using Fable would put you out of business? Or is this a hope that using Fable will allow you to stay in business?

Reducing your costs is also an advantage, but I'm not surprised such binary thinking is present here

So the panic generators ("You will be left behind!") are winning. Creating a sense of urgency that makes you switch off the higher rational functions is a key element in every successful scam.

Nonsense. Do you buy state of the art pens, pencils, printers, paper, computers, disks, etc.? No. You buy whatever is the best value for the case at hand. That’s often not the SOTA option.