This. The frontier race is about building the smartest generalist, but most companies don’t need that. They need a specialist tuned to their workflows. Narrower scope means smaller models, lower costs, faster inference and often better results. General models become the foundation, not the finished product. It’s still all to play for! 💪😎✌️

Exactly. At work, we're already looking at getting our own compute for an open model for some automatons we built. Google's models are alright, but they are retiring them too fast. So we want to get off that treadmill. Plus a local model gives us opportunities to experiment with LoRAs and techniques like what cactus hybrid did with a small head predicting certainty (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010782). Plus, the big players are removing sampling options thinking they know what's best when it is obvious they don't.

OpenAI is a good reminder that mission statements and business incentives don’t always stay aligned. That said, I’d judge DeepSeek less by the rhetoric and more by what they actually release. Hype is cheap: open weights, reproducible results and useful tools are much harder to fake.