How I keep up with AI progress

The big question for me at the moment is whether to go pay-for-tool or pay-for-model.

If I pay for a tool that includes access to frontier models, then they'll keep the models up to date over time for me, let me use models from multiple providers, and the tool is carefully designed around the capabilities and limitations of the models it works with. On the other hand I can't really use the powerful model the tool works with for other applications or write my own.

If I pay for models, then I can only really use it with that manufacturers tools or tools that aren't optimised for the model but allow you to bring your own keys, and if the model provider I'm paying falls behind then I'm tied in for the duration of the contract. The big advantage is that there is a lot of innovation in tooling happening at the moment and you can avoid being locked out of that or having to pay many times for access to the same frontier models accross multiple different tools.

I think we'll see a shift to BYO LLM in the future. I saw that overleaf offers an assistant feature and an associated subscription. But I already pay for ChatGPT and Github copilot, I'm not going to pay for a third assistant - particularly when I can just bypass overleaf and use copilot in vscode directly.