Not saying it couldn't happen in the future, but we've got to be circumspect about that narrative after almost 2 years of it, no?
Doesn't that indicate its becoming _more_ true?
If you control for cost, not only the gap closed, but it switched already.
DeepSeek 4.1 Flash dominates perf/cost for suitable tasks.
And if you do need SOTA, Kimi 3.1 Pro scores 55 on https://artificialanalysis.ai vs 58 of Opus 5.5. And they were released 1 month appart.
Kimi even outperforms Opus on some tasks because it doesn't downgrade its intelligente on cyber and cryptography workloads or ban you if you use it for LLM research.
So the gap is 1 month, or zero, depending on your needs.
but if they cost the same then who cares if it's SOTA or not? If I can use fable to solve a problem a lesser model is capable of but i have fable at my finger tips at about the same cost then why would i go through the effort to switch?
Even Kimi K3.1 costs half of Opus 5.5 on openrouter which is the closest indication of cost that we have.
Idk what 2027 will bring but i've been pretty wrong in my predictions so far and so am excited to see what unfolds. I mean it could unfold as a zombie apocalypse but at least it's different than "more of the same".