I suspect that opinions in that direction might be the result of a lack of ambition in applying agentic AI.
The cheap models are good enough for what exactly? AI assisted development, or working autonomously on a task for 4 hours?
As long as the best available model does the latter more reliably and with noticeably better results, it is easily worth spending a few hundred per month for me.
The idea that OpenAI and Anthropic cannot make enough profit in my opinion depends entirely on how large the gap is going to be.
Will the gap become smaller with improvements starting to slow, or will it get wider as the labs successfully apply their models to research and improvements speed up?
You call it "lack of ambition", implying a certain arrogance; more humble people might just call it "a different sweet spot" of AI integration. After all, the goal in the end is not to use up as many AI tokens as possible, but the goal is to implement/perform a certain business case in the best way possible with regard to cost/speed/quality.
It's not like everyone using AI has the same software development cycle. It's not even that everyone using AI is developing software.
A harness of limited capability is a component that doesn't exist in your proposal, right? Just like non-automatable or at least hard-to-automate things like physical actions to be performed in the real world as part of a business task do not exist, too? Same goes for coordination with other real humans - doesn't exist.
Why don't you give some examples of tasks that you think fall into this category, where AI assistance only is the perfect solution and which could not conceivable be done more effectively autonomously by more capable models?
For coding, I don't see it.
Physical tasks? I don't know, it's not my area of expertise. I do not think AI is widely deployed for physical tasks yet, not even the SOTA is good enough.
The cheap models are good enough for what exactly? AI assisted development, or working autonomously on a task for 4 hours?
As long as the best available model does the latter more reliably and with noticeably better results, it is easily worth spending a few hundred per month for me.
The idea that OpenAI and Anthropic cannot make enough profit in my opinion depends entirely on how large the gap is going to be.
Will the gap become smaller with improvements starting to slow, or will it get wider as the labs successfully apply their models to research and improvements speed up?