Built-In Tools vs Custom Tools in LLM Agents
When building AI agents, a tool can be anything that the model can ask to use such as a search engine, a…
OpenAI and Anthropic's moat for developers is subsidized inference, meaning reliable, fast, Western-hosted access to running models at an affordable monthly price. If that breaks, I think they will immediately lose 50%+ of individual developer customers and small businesses, large corporations will follow.
Their business looks solid right until it breaks. If OpenAI and Anthropic stop subsidizing heavy usage, people will flee overnight to DeepSeek and whatever good open model is cheapest that week.
I have multiple OpenAI and Anthropic subscriptions and whenever I run out of weekly usage on all of them, I switch to DeepSeek, using it with pi and OpenRouter. The main annoyance here is that the providers on OpenRouter are a mixed bag, some of them I don't trust with my data, some of them have too high prices, especially for cached tokens, others are just not reliable, producing timeouts and other failures. While DeepSeek v4.1 Flash is clearly not on par with GPT-6-Astra or Fable 5.1, it is good enough as a daily driver. The main reason why I still prefer using OpenAI and Anthropic is because they are fast, reliable and cheap enough when using their subsidized subscriptions.
Running inference at scale is hard, and no one is as experienced with this as OpenAI and Anthropic. This is the only real moat they still have. But it's only a matter of time until we will see other providers catching up. At some point LLM inference will be the new shared webhosting.
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