Nobody is using the startups mentioned in the article. Ask anyone working for a profitable established business. There is OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. That’s the only game in enterprise town. Any jank startup can fine tune to save pennies, but the reality is that they are passing the cost to the consumer because it takes more tokens to solve problems with open weight models (fine tuned or not) via multi turn prompting than it is to just pay the closed source tax and get your solution in one or two turns. The people valuing these startups have to park money somewhere. They have obscene amounts of capital they can gamble. 8 billion? That’s nothing. Someone made a gamble and backed it up with capital. It’s only worth that much to the investors that already paid the price for it. So yea, that’s the value to the investors holding the bag. And it is their job to produce articles like this to hype the investment so they can sell the bag to some schmuck that falls for this crap. And a lot of them will. Poor schmucks. Filthy rich schmucks. No matter. Someone paid for it and they will do everything they can to convince the potential buyers that bag is worth more. But it’s only worth is the price that was paid. Nothing more. If I was rich and put in a bid to buy Reflection for 3 trillion dollars and I put up the capital, that’s what it’s worth to me. Now my job is to convince you to buy the bag for 5 trillion. And know this: I will poison the media with these articles to convince you that’s the real worth.

Reflection is worth nothing to the rest of the world. The bag holder is desperate. Don’t fall for it.