> 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.
I'm the only dev. I simply don't have time for dealing with the code from non-SOTA models. I'm doing all I can to keep this business afloat.
You also don't really need LLM's, we still have software engineers too. Everyone is focusing so heavily on the speed gain producing code, but in my experience clients of established products aren't really waiting for massive changes and gigantic features to be added. We aren't taking the time to think things through anymore.