LLMs are a commodity, and if you act like that, a lot of things become more clear.

The big model labs don't want that to be the case, but it's obviously true.

If you think about LLMs as monolithic, omniscient Chatbots, then LLMs don't feel commodity.

But if you think of LLMs as just boring inputs to other processes that matter, you don't care as much about them.

If you primarily use LLMs as a chatbot, you'll care about the models.

If you primarily use LLMs like electricity, as an input to the real thing, you won't care as much.

A lot of people are talking about Claude's changes in its Constitution.

I personally don't care and couldn't be bothered to care.

I also don't care about logarithmic improvements in the frontier models much.

The various frontier models are already wildly over-powered for what I need them for, so I don't really care.^[bs]

If LLMs are commodity, they will be invisible components of everything you use.

They will fade into the background and become boring and unremarkable.

Just like electricity.