> The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.
True, but that's not really applicable here since LLMs themselves are not stable, and are certainly not stable within a vendors own product line. Like imagine if every time Oracle shipped a new version it was significantly behaviorally inconsistent with the previous one. Upgrading within a vendor and switching vendors ends up being the same task. So you quickly solidify on either
1) never upgrading, although with these being cloud services that's not necessarily feasible, and since LLMs are far from a local maxima in quality that'd quickly leave your stack obsolete
or
2) being forced to be robust, which makes it easy to migrate to other vendors
True, but that's not really applicable here since LLMs themselves are not stable, and are certainly not stable within a vendors own product line. Like imagine if every time Oracle shipped a new version it was significantly behaviorally inconsistent with the previous one. Upgrading within a vendor and switching vendors ends up being the same task. So you quickly solidify on either
1) never upgrading, although with these being cloud services that's not necessarily feasible, and since LLMs are far from a local maxima in quality that'd quickly leave your stack obsolete
or
2) being forced to be robust, which makes it easy to migrate to other vendors