We are spinning up planet-sized brains just to format a JSON file
Source: Dev.to
Overview
We are spinning up planet‑sized brains just to format a JSON file. That’s the God Model Fallacy in a nutshell.
We’re in the Uncanny Valley: 90 % on benchmarks, but the system still feels dumb in real life, and nothing truly works without heavy prompt massaging or multiple turns.
I spent the last eight months (and most of my savings) architecting my own GenAI stack to learn whether engineers still have a future or should all quickly become founders for LLM‑wrappers. Here’s what I think now.
Historical Parallel
- $100 k specialized Lisp Machines were sold as the only way to run “real AI” (expert systems).
- Then normal Sun workstations did the same job for $20 k, and every Lisp Machine company went to zero literally overnight.
God Models (GPT‑5, Claude Opus, Grok‑4) are the modern equivalent of Lisp Machines.
Nvidia H200 racks are the modern equivalent of Symbolics boxes.
Emerging Architecture
- Tiny router (1–3 B) → picks the lane
- Retriever → grabs context
- Specialist (7–70 B) → does the work
- Synthesizer → makes it pretty
The whole chain costs roughly 1/100th of a single 405 B call.
Two Paradigms
Monolith World
- Expensive tokens
- Easy code
Chained World
- Almost free tokens
- Engineering hell (routing, fallbacks, latency, observability, race conditions)
Implications
- Building open‑ended, user‑facing LLM applications like chat‑bots will become too complex.
- The day a random 3–8 B open‑weight model on an M5 / Snapdragon casually does 95 % of what we currently pay $500 k+/month for, the entire frontier‑model funding circus will collapse.
To the AGI maximalists: over‑investing in a beautiful idea is the hardest thing to quit.
Call to Builders
The magic is dying. Real engineering is finally allowed to start. That’s actually good news.
Which boring, high‑ROI workflow do you think survives the Integration Tax?