AI model switching costs remain non-zero due to fragile harness optimizations
Yasser Elsaid · ⚡️ Competing with ChatGPT and Sierra, building a $10M ARR company — Yasser Elsaid, Founder, Chatbase · May 2, 2026 · at 17:13
Chatbase founder Yasser Elsaid pushes back against the belief that foundation models are completely interchangeable commodities for production applications.
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“People keep saying like the cost of switching between models is zero. It's cheap, but it's not zero because sometimes you like spend, you know, three, four months, like fine tuning exactly how the model should be, or like how the, Product should be. And then once you like change the model, it, it's bad.”
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