Every month a new model tops a leaderboard and my inbox fills with "should we switch?" The honest answer is almost always no, and the reason is not performance.

The three questions that actually decide it

  • Where does it run? A model you can host near your assets beats a smarter one you must ship footage to.
  • Can you steer it? Reliable structure and tool-use beat raw eloquence for pipeline work every time.
  • Will it still exist? Betting a show on a model that might vanish is a producer's nightmare.
Our eval is not MMLU. It is retime a shot description, parse a note, draft a Houdini VEX snippet. Rankings look nothing like the public boards.

For a studio, boring and available beats brilliant and unreliable — every single sprint.

The race is real and it is thrilling to watch. But watch it the way you watch the weather, not the way you chase a bus. Build on the stable ground, and let the frontier come to you.