Its enshittificating real fast. They'll just keep releasing model after model, more expensive than the last, marginal gains, but touted as "the next thing". Evangelists will say that they're afraid, it's the future, in 6 months it's all over. Anthropic will keep astroturfing on Reddit. CEOs will make even more outlandish claims.
You raised a good point, what's a good metric for LLM performance? There's surely all the benchmarks out there, but aren't they one and done? Usually at release? What keeps checking the performance of those models. At this point it's just by feel. People say models have been dumbed down, and that's it.
I think the actual future is open source models. Problem is, they don't have the huge marketing budget Anthropic or OpenAI does.
This is most likely trajectory I fear. It reminds me a lot of Oracle, where they rebrand and reskin products just to change pricing/marketing without adding anything.
My only problem lumping them in is a huge part of those products are the UI and UX. It’s what you interact with as a user. So, a reskin with no new features is a valid version in my opinion.
It’s not always for the best mind you, but I do think major changes to the GUI or UX do deserve a version indicator given they are relatively infrequent. Without some requirement of course.
Nobody buys Oracle because of the UI or upgrades because of a new UI. It’s the underlying tool that matters and if my ugly version is working there is no incentive to upgrade to a prettier version.
You raised a good point, what's a good metric for LLM performance? There's surely all the benchmarks out there, but aren't they one and done? Usually at release? What keeps checking the performance of those models. At this point it's just by feel. People say models have been dumbed down, and that's it.
I think the actual future is open source models. Problem is, they don't have the huge marketing budget Anthropic or OpenAI does.