zlacker

In general I feel like all model providers eventually become infrastructure providers. If the difference between models is very small, it will be about who can serve it reliably, with the most features, with the most security, at the lowest price.

I'm the head of R&D at Rev.ai and this is exactly what we've seen in ASR. We started at $1.20/hr, and our new models are $0.10/hr in < 2 years. We have done human transcription for ~15 years and the revenue from ASR is 3 orders of magnitude less ($90/hr vs $0.10/hr) and it will likely go lower. However, our volumes are many orders of magnitude higher now for serving ASR, so it's about even or growth in most cases still.

I think for Mistral to compete with Meta they need a better API. The on-prem/self-hosted people will always choose the best models for themselves and you won't be able to monetize them in a FOSS world anyways, so you just need the better platform. Right now, Meta isn't providing a top-tier platform, but that may eventually change.