"No Vendor Lock-In" Is Code for "No Product"

"No Vendor Lock-In" Is Code for "No Product"

Products that pitch a model picker as their main feature are making a losing bet, argues the author. Users don't care about the list of models underneath; they want the best performance for the task. We now judge models by cost per task, not cost per million tokens, and frontier models still win. The real job is to hand users the result, not let them choose a model.

Cheaper today still means that the output is (sometimes, slightly) worse. If it wasn't, open source would already be the default.

More from this day

2026-10-04