Is there a "good enough" endgame for LLMs and AI where benchmarks stop mattering because end users don't notice or care? In such a scenario brand would matter more than the best tech, and OpenAI is way out in front in brand recognition.
But for anyone using LLM's to help speed up academic literature reviews where every detail matters, or coding where every detail matters, or anything technical where every detail matters -- the differences very much matter. And benchmarks serve just to confirm your personal experience anyways, as the differences between models becomes extremely apparent when you're working in a niche sub-subfield and one model is showing glaring informational or logical errors and another mostly gets it right.
And then there's a strong possibility that as experts start to say "I always trust <LLM name> more", that halo effect spreads to ordinary consumers who can't tell the difference themselves but want to make sure they use "the best" -- at least for their homework. (For their AI boyfriends and girlfriends, other metrics are probably at play...)
We've seen this movie before. Snapchat was the darling. Infact, it invented the entire category and was dominating the format for years. Then it ran out of time.
Now very few people use Snapchat, and it has been reduced to a footnote in history.
If you think I'm exaggerating, that just proves my point.
I never said Snapchat is dead. It still lives on, but it is a shell of the past. They had no moat, and the competitors caught up (Instagram, Whatsapp and even LinkedIn copied Snapchat with stories .. and rest is history)
In fact so far, they consistently fail in exactly these scenario, glossing over random important details whenever you double check results in depth.
You might have found models, prompts or workflows that work for you though, I'm interested.
Just go outside the bubble plus take a bit older people
They are both Android/Google Search users so all it really took was "sure I guess I'll try that" in response to a nudge from Google. For me personally I have subscriptions to Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini for coding but use Gemini for 90% of chatbot questions. Eventually I'll cancel some of them but will probably keep Gemini regardless because I like having the extra storage with my Google One plan bundle. Google having a pre-existing platform/ecosystem is a huge advantage imo.