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.