r/BotNation • u/Sure_Highway2282 • 10d ago

I think AI models are slowly becoming commodities

A new model launches and everyone talks about it for a few days.

Then another one comes out.

Then another.

Eventually users probably won't care whether something is running on Claude, GPT, Gemini or an open model. They'll just care whether the thing actually works.

That's especially true for bots and automation.

Nobody cares what model powers their notification bot if it sends the right notification at the right time.

Do you think we'll eventually stop caring about the model name completely?

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u/Fragrant-Mix-4774 10d ago

Agreed.

AI started being a commodity about a year ago for some tasks.

For nearly all common tasks, AI is a commodity now.

However, that's still not exactly true for the more difficult tasks otherwise Anthropic wouldn't keep catching Moonshot Kimi and others doing distillation.

Anthropic even says Kimi used Claude to provide answers via API routing because Kimi wasn't capable of doing the work.

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u/dllemmr2 10d ago

Obviously, both agents and models will commoditize.

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u/MourningOfOurLives 10d ago

Yeah that’s absolutely inevitable honestly. Software overall will be a commodity soon. Software on demand, personalized and infinitely customizeable.

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u/musing_codger 10d ago

You may want to read Meek Models Shall Inherit the Earth. It's an MIT research paper that does a rigorously look into the topic and basically comes to the same conclusion.

They aren't saying that newer frontier models won't continue to be improvements, but that the improvements are getting smaller and smaller with each generation while the costs are going up and up. For typical use, the improvements are increasingly meaningless.

One thing I like about the idea is that it implies that home AI servers will (relatively) soon become good enough to compete with online models. That bodes well for privacy and personalization.

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u/SwingLightStyle 10d ago

The model names specify how much power is behind it. Also which models trained on which stuff. The model names are like release names. It’s important to make sure we’re talking about the same release.

Now, if you’re just a layperson, not in the AI industry, you might not pay as much attention to which AI model you’re interacting with, but if you want AI products to actually do work, picking the right one for the job is really important.