The people who have no power over the situation: users.
Users always have the choice to ignore benchmarks or run their own
Exactly. Even a brief one (a single task done on two models) showed me GLM 5.3 Flash was superior to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash.
DS used nearly twice the budget to accomplish the same thing.
Ideally, these tasks should be something you actually need day to day.
I'd rank it DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 > GLM 5.3 Flash > DeepSeek 4.1 Flash (Original) - 1017 is a huge improvement.
That’s missing the point. Frontier models get shittier in certain ways with each release, due to benchmaxxing, and there is nothing we can do about that.