Erik says open-source models have improved enough that customers can often replace frontier models with nearly comparable models at substantially lower cost, reducing the need to fine-tune.

“I feel like fine-tuning the value prop a couple years ago was like, "Yeah, you know, open source models, they're not quite as good, but, you know, if you take, you know, a small model and you fine-tune it on your specific domain, you can actually reach the frontier in terms of, you know, quality and cost."”

“Uh, today I, I would say, like, the open source models are so good that, like, you can basically just, like, swap them out and just run, you know, instead of, you know, the, the frontier ones, you can run, you know, Chemica three or, or, or, or whatever, DeepSeek four point one or GLM five point three, and they're, like, basically almost as good as, like, the frontier model at a much lower cost.”