The original point that I was making was never purely a technical one. Performance, economics, convenience, and business trends all play a part in what I think

The original point that I was making was never purely a technical one. Performance, economics, convenience, and business trends all play a part in what I think will happen. Even if LLM improvement slows, it’ll probably result in the same treadmill effect we see in other software. Consider MS Office, Adobe Creative (Cloud), or just about any pro level software. The older versions aren’t really used, for various reasons, including performance, features, compatibility, etc. Why would LLMs, which seem to be on an even faster trajectory than conventional software, be any different? Users will want to continue upgrading, and in the case of AI, that’ll mean continuing to access the latest cloud model. No doubt that someone can run gpt-oss-120b five years from now on device, but outside of privacy, why would they when you can get a faster, smarter answer (for free, likely) from a service?