It's not that high a bar, and we're still very much publication to implementation. Most recently, I was able to use SAM2, SV3D, Mistral NeMo, and Flux.dev day-one, and I'm certainly not some heady software engineer.

There's just a lot of great stuff you're missing out on if you're waiting on products while ignoring the very accessible, freely available tools they're built on top of and often reductions of.

I'm not against overlays like ollama and lm studio, but I feel more confused by why they exist when there's no additional barrier to going on huggingface or using kcpp, ooba, etc.

I just assume it's an awareness issue, but I'm probably wrong.

While it is most proper and convenient to use these out-of-the-box products for fit scenarios,

Doing so will at the very least not help us with our interviews. It will also restrict our mindset of how one can make use of LLMs through the distraction of sleek, heavily abstracted interfaces. This makes it harder, if not impossible for us to come up with bright new ideas that undermine models in various novel ways, which are almost always derived from deep understanding of how things actually work under the hood.