the last 5%

i love using agents as historians. in 1995 a sun sparc workstation cost $50,000 and ran proprietary unix -- i never realized how big these computers were

by 2005 the layers had come apart. linux disrupted and ran on $500 commodity hardware

the network outlived the computer

openai charges $5/$30 per million tokens. deepseek charges $0.14/$0.28 for comparable work. that’s not a discount, it’s a different order of magnitude. the bet that the value lives in the integrated whole is the same bet. the question was never whether open models are “as good.” it’s whether the last 5% of quality is worth 100x the price

it kinda feels like history has answered this one before? we’ll see