I was thinking about this earlier today and I came to the following question:
If you had a model 10x as capable as the best model out today, but it cost 100x more, would there be a market, and, if so, how big?
I think there would be a market and I think it would be large.
So, I agree.
Many people would, and you'll find that they're building crappy webapps where you dont need SoTA. Like seriously who needs these frontier models?
Unless you're doing some extermely difficult post-grad lvl research, you do not need a 100x PhD research assistant, especially not for whatever silly SaaS product most people are building.
There's people at my job that get so much more done than everyone else using Fable/Opus/Astra. and all they use is the fastest cheapest models. I'd say the people who are using sota models for everything are doing it just because they prefer to be lazy.
You simply do not need these frontier models, they outgrew most people's needs 6 months ago, but for some reason people still want to run a 700k rack of gpus full throttle to center a div for them.
I think the market would be huge, especially if it's the "can complete a large task in 3 turns instead of 15" kind of smart. Lots of people and companies would pay for quality + speed.
Doing what? How many jobs involve solving Millennium Prize math challenges?
99% of everything is CRUD LoB apps.
I think there would be a market, but it would mostly be a FOMO market. That is, people would be doing tasks on it that the "regular" model is more than capable of handling, because they're afraid they're leaving something on the table by not using the absolute best option.
Certainly, there's a real market for it too, with people who would actually use its advanced capabilities, and see the 100x price as worth it.
But sure, even a mostly-FOMO market is still a market. If people are paying, people are paying.