well, it is true. there is a price ceiling for intelligence, there were news about how adoption of fable was lower than expected, only hitting 11% of enterprise spending for customers with anthropic, iirc 26% for Sol with openai customers.

in any case, I've been using open and closed models since sonnet 4, i remember when the best I could get was qwen 3 480b coder, you can definitely feel the gap closing going from that and GLM 4.5, to GLM 5.3, DeepSeek Flash V4.1, Kimi K3 etc, it's reached the point where i wish I had V4.1 at work, it's faster and bullshits me less when I use it in my personal projects. And I have unlimited access to fable 5.1

The gap really is closing, though. I don't remember the source, but there was a publication recently stating that it's 4 months at this point. So, 4 months where you can charge premium prices for the small subset of tasks where only a frontier model will do. I have to think the big AI duopoly is at an inflection point where most of their customers haven't just yet realized that they're being fleeced.