The fact that the Chinese models have caught up on benchmarks suggests to me that its likely we will start to transition now into much more of a brand war. It will be subjective qualities that drive our decisions more than measures of absolute intelligence. Already I am choosing models more because I like the personality or style of what they do than because I think they have the absolute highest chance of outputting the most technically correct answer to any given prompt. It will be very interesting to see how things evolve in this direction.
For me now it’s simply cost and speed. With GPT5.6 and Fable (and respective open models since then) we passed a threshold where intelligence is sufficient. Now I just need speed of iteration and good prices.
