Zach Lloyd

Do you think it's open?

I don't think open either, if I'm being honest.

The reason I don't think open is that it's just so damn expensive to build these things.

And so what's the economic incentive?

It's not like open source software.

People make the analogy like, oh, open.

I'll take the word open and apply it to open models.

Open source software works because it's a bunch of hobbyist developers who are giving their time to build something really hard.

Open models, somebody's got to spend all the money to make the thing competitive.

But here's the flip side.

Here's the way it could work is like it could get to a point where just like for coding, let's say our domain, it's basically solved, meaning like models that are good enough and you don't need the frontier model.

And what actually starts to matter is like, how good are you getting context in from a company?

How good is your interface?

How good is your automation, like an orchestration stuff?

And that's not crazy to me.

Like it's crazy to me that the frontier model would be open, but it's not crazy to me that there's like a good enough model that is open.

yeah i mean i it's not how i frame it i would frame it as like coding may literally be solved which is a crazy thing to say but like at the model layer it might just be the level of intelligent token is like good enough that if you feed it a code base and a prompt and a bunch of context it can make the right coding change and you don't need this year's this year's model to use a elvis costello

reference to actually get the good to get the good results so i would look at it more like that and then yeah if there's competition or you can do model routing like if you're like squeezing margins like that i think it's a more precarious place to be but i think that you know the price per intelligence for any fixed level of intelligence is definitely falling

I love Elvis Costello.

This is a fun recording.