Short answer: Ivan Lee says models are largely commoditized and open weights options like Google's Gemma 4 are good enough for tasks such as summarizing email or meeting notes; frontier models are for problems like curing cancer.
Watch this answer from Episode 56 (starts at 5:30) · Episode 56 notes and transcript
From Episode 56: He Built Siri at Apple. Now His Private AI Runs Inside the FBI, Google, and Netflix., starting at 5:30.
Sam Nadler [5:29]: Awesome. And is there any... And, obviously, I'm I'm guessing the answer is no. They're not comfortable sharing their, proprietary knowledge with Anthropic and OpenAI. It... But is there... Are... Is there a performance gap, or are you seeing that performance gap close?
Ivan Lee [5:46]: That's a great question. So that is actually, the most... That's the number one question that a lot of these companies ask. I think, it's been a whirlwind of four years. It's only been four years since this technology was invented. And in the first couple of years, there was an immense performance gap. If you recall, just a couple of years ago, OpenAI was so far ahead of the pack, it was inconceivable that anyone would catch up. Right? Fast forward to March of this year, and if you weren't using Anthropic's Claude here in Silicon Valley, people are questioning your sanity. Right? And like you said at the beginning of the podcast, the market leader is is constantly shifting now. So we've gone to this point where the models are largely commoditized even amongst the proprietary models. And then on top of that, we've had this, like I said, wave of open weight model releases. Some of those come from China, but recently, Meta reentered the open weights game with a really powerful model of their own. We've been big fans of Google's Gemma four here, at Datasaur.
Ivan Lee [6:45]: So there's a lot of options, actually. And when it comes to the performance gap, absolutely. Like, if I were working on solving cancer, I would hope... Or, like, if our clients were working on solving cancer, I hope they're using Astral and Fable. But if you're using this to summarize your emails, if you're using this to recap your meeting notes, you don't need Fable for that. That is absolutely overkill. And that's where a lot of the low hanging fruit, a lot of the enterprise agents that are necessary out there, these open weights models are more than good enough.
