Let’s create a mess first.
You’re broke.
You’re a founder.
You’re staring at two doors:
Door #1: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure — press a button, pay by the token, ship something tomorrow.
Door #2: Hugging Face, LLaMA, Falcon, Mistral, a GitHub repo with 40k stars and zero documentation. Models you can actually download. Own. Modify. Run anywhere.
Which door do you pick?
You freeze. Investors inform you one thing. Developers inform you another. Your cofounder’s friconclude read a Medium post about open source being “the future.” Meanwhile, your AWS bill sees like a ransom note.
And while you’re dithering, your competitor ships a product that’s half-baked but live. Guess what? Users don’t care about your philosophical crisis. They just want something that works.
That’s the chaos. That’s the trap. I’ve seen founders waste months here. I’ve wasted months here.
Quick anecdote. Back in 2017 — pre-ChatGPT hype, before everyone suddenly became an “AI expert” — I co-founded a company building speech analytics for call centers. We believed we were clever. Hybrid stack: Google’s proprietary Speech-to-Text API for accuracy…
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