Deepseek has been a game changer for me. I don't use them right now but the model is very capable.

What a lot of people don't seem to realize is how much of the edge of the 'frontier' is in the tooling, the prompts and the harness. The LLMs themselves are already all reasonably close if you keep all the other stuff constant. Sure, one will have an edge in one domain or another. But that edge mostly translates to a degree of performance rather than some absolute. And if you allow for a few more toolcalls, a web search or a longer context then that difference is much smaller than it might seem at first glance.

The calculus may be that DeepSeek (or similar) + human is good enough and that the frontier simply won’t have the growth to get to the next level that differentiates them and justifies the token cost. They get stuck in a race to the bottom which is opposite of what they want.