Sometimes. As a tool, not an outsourced human, oracle, or some transcendent companion con artists like Altman are trying to sell.

See how grounded this interview is, from a company with a model trained on peanuts compared to ChatGPT, and that takes even less to run:

…In 2025, with the launch of Manus and Claude Code, we realized that coding and agentic functions are more useful. They contribute more economically and significantly improve people’s efficiency. We are no longer putting simple chat at the top of our priorities. Instead, we are exploring more on the coding side and the agent side. We observe the trend and do many experiments on it.

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/the-zai-playbook

They talk about how the next release will be very small/lightweight, and more task focused. How important gaining efficiency through architecture (not scaling up) is now. They even touch on how their own models are starting to be useful utilities in their workflows, and specifically not miraculous worker replacements.

Yes, as far as scalability, cheaper more efficient models can be used in applications which require thousands of uses a day.