Perhaps not even necessarily subjective, just performance is highly task-dependent and even variable within tasks. People get objectively different experiences, and assume one or another is better, but it's basically random.

SOTA models war is the new console war.

But more seriously, I can't help but be amused by how emotionally invested in their AI brand of choice people are getting.

And the subjectivity is bidirectional.

People judge models on their outputs, but how you like to prompt has a tremendous impact on those outputs and explains why people have wildly different experiences with the same model.

They might be converging somewhat. The ultimate limiting factor is training data. Eventually I think they will converge and then the competition will be on memory and compute efficiency, with the best being the smallest maximally capable model.

AI is a complete commodity

One model can replace another at any given moment in time.

It's NOT a winner-takes-all industry

and hence none of the lofty valuations make sense.

the AI bubble burst will be epic and make us all poorer. Yay