Every company is now using ChatGPT. That means nobody has a competitive advantage from using ChatGPT.
Competitive advantage comes from proprietary systems. Systems that your competitors cannot replicate. Systems built on your data; your processes; your domain expertise.
Custom LLMs are exactly that.
When you train a model on your data; the model becomes 3-4x smarter on tasks specific to your business. It understands your product in ways that ChatGPT never will. It knows your market. It has seen your customer interactions. It understands the nuances of your domain.
More importantly; it runs on your infrastructure. Your data never leaves your network. This matters for regulated industries. It matters for competitive secrecy. It matters for control.
The barrier to entry used to be impossibly high. You needed PhDs. You needed massive compute resources. You needed months of work.
That barrier has collapsed. Open-source models have gotten so good that you can fine-tune them on your data with a single GPU. The process takes days; not months. And the results are production-ready.
The companies building custom LLMs today will own their categories tomorrow. Because they will have insight into their business; their customers; and their market that competitors cannot match.
The question is not whether you should build a custom LLM. The question is how quickly you can build it before your competitors do.