With the launch of Kimi K3 and Fable, have we reached AI’s ‘good enough’ era? What does this mean for OpenAI and other closed source AI labs?

Charting Models Against the 'Good Enough' AI Threshold

The 'good enough' concept is the idea that technologies progress to the point where they work for most people. After that, further improvements produce diminishing returns.

Here are a few examples:

• Can openers: Good enough
• Car tires: Good enough
• Email: Good enough
• Mobile phones: Good enough

The list goes on.

Have we reached the 'good enough' era in AI? Over the last 18 months or so, we've seen increasingly capable models emerge. We now have Fable, a heavily restricted model gated behind a pay-as-you-go meter. Kimi K3 may be almost as powerful as Fable in some areas, and will be open sourced later this month.

Are many of the models we currently have sufficient to meet the needs of most people (i.e., the average AI user)? It's likely.

Some important caveats:

• Good enough doesn't mean that most people know how to take maximum advantage of AI. I just released an AI research study, Secrets of the LLM Whisperer, featuring a simulation of nearly 240,000 LLM users. It revealed that using AI to its maximum advantage (and in a cost effective manner) requires certain habits and behaviors that most people aren't aware of, or don't regularly practice.
• I'm talking about most people. There are many areas where AI models are still at the 'below threshold' level. Coding is pretty advanced. Research, writing and analysis? Hit or miss. However, with the right harness and scaffolding (and knowing where to use models most effectively), even 'less capable' models can reach the 'good enough' threshold

Closed source AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) made a big bet that they would be able to control the pace and distribution of AI models, offering increasingly expensive and high-powered AI to the public, to gain monopoly and pricing power.

Models like Kimi K3 (and the U.S. government) are a threat to that approach. Open source can bring 'good enough' AI inference to the masses. Kimi K3 isn't something that you can spin up on your laptop. But, if previous trends hold, I expect a Kimi-level model will be released that can be run reasonably well on high-level consumer hardware in the future. The U.S. federal government is now controlling access to the most high-powered models, asking to review them before release. We could see models permanently restricted in the future.

For competitive reasons (and because open source models don't have this distribution chokepoint), I could imagine OpenAI and Anthropic supporting the U.S. government putting import and usage controls on Chinese models for national/cyber security reasons.

But, if we've already reached the 'good enough' stage in AI, that might not matter.

What's your take? Have we reached the 'good enough' era in AI?