> In fact it's never been a closer race on who is the 'best'

Thank you for pointing out that fact. Sometimes it's very hard to keep perspective.

Sometimes I use Mistral as my main LLM. I know it's not lauded as the top performing LLM but the truth of the matter is that it's results are just as useful as the best models that ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude outputs, and it is way faster.

There is indeed diminished returns on the current blend of commercial LLMs. Deep seek already proved that cost can be a major factor and quality can even improve. I think we're very close to see competition based on price, which might be the reason there is so much talk about mixture of experts approaches and how specialized models can drive down cost while improving targeted output.