Build vs Buy: Choosing How to Get AI Capabilities Quiz

Answers and explanations appear as you take the quiz.

1. Which route does the guide say is where most custom enterprise AI work happens?
   • Training a foundation model from scratch
   • Buying a finished SaaS product
   • Building on a foundation model API with your own prompts, retrieval and tools
   • Hiring a consultancy to write rules by hand
2. What practical rule does the guide give for deciding what to build?
   • Always build, because licences are expensive
   • Build where AI is core to your differentiation and buy where it is a commodity
   • Buy everything until you have 1,000 employees
   • Build only if a competitor has already built it
3. Why is 'building is cheaper because there is no licence fee' a misconception?
   • Total cost of ownership includes staff, evaluation, security, support and keeping up with model changes
   • Open-weight models always require a paid licence
   • Building is illegal without vendor approval
   • APIs charge more when you build your own interface
4. A hospital wants to process clinical notes but its data rules make sending records to an outside service difficult. Which option best addresses this?
   • An off-the-shelf consumer chatbot
   • A public API with default settings
   • Waiting for regulations to change
   • Self-hosting an open-weight model inside its own infrastructure
5. How can a team reduce vendor lock-in when building on an API?
   • Sign the longest possible contract
   • Use an abstraction layer so the application can switch to a different model with limited rework
   • Avoid writing any evaluation tests
   • Hard-code one provider's model name throughout the codebase
6. How does expected volume affect the build vs buy cost comparison?
   • Volume has no effect on cost
   • APIs always become cheaper as volume grows, so self-hosting never makes sense
   • Per-call API costs can exceed self-hosting at very high scale while being far cheaper at low scale
   • Self-hosting is always cheapest at low volume
7. Why does the guide recommend keeping your own evaluation set of real tasks?
   • It lets you compare SaaS tools, API models and self-hosted models on equal terms
   • Vendors require it before selling a licence
   • It replaces the need for security review
   • It is used to train the foundation model
8. According to the guide, when should fine-tuning be considered?
   • Before trying any prompts
   • Only when buying SaaS
   • Never, because it is always worse than prompting
   • After prompting and retrieval have been tried