If the model is truly on par with Opus 4.6/Gemini 3.1/GPT 5.4 (beyond benchmarks) this still puts MSL in the frontier lab category, which is no small feat given that they pretty much rebooted last year
replyMany labs aren't able to keep up with the frontier, xAI, Mistral
Fourth place means you're not reliant on any of the external providers for internal AI use, which is important for organizational health and negotiating with those other providers.
replyI’m not sure it’s useful for negotiating, the capex to build it was surely orders of magnitude more than it would cost to just use one of the other frontier models.
replyIt’s like someone negotiating by saying, “I’ll waste even MORE money to build something worse if you don’t give me a deal.”
I’m not discounting there may be other advantages to doing it. I just don’t think negotiating is one.