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.

The other thing is most people don't really care about price per token or whatever but how much it will cost to execute (successfully) a task they want.

It doesn't matter if a model is e.g. 30% cheaper to use than another (token-wise) but I need to burn 2x more tokens to get the same acceptable result.