I think, despite the desperate attempt at IBM to remain relevant (and in business), their CEO has a point here that do you really need SOTA models for everything?

I had a really nice time with GLM5.2 for a month or two - it was, in my experience, approx Opus 4.5ish level of capability when I think Opus 4.8 was the new hotness

Even today, I use Gemini 3.8 Flash as my daily driver for most coding. Its fast and good, even if it is not the absolute SOTA at coding benchmarks it really is very good. Yes I have tried Opus 5.5 and 4 Argon etc and yes the are better, but do I need that?

I think that we are going to be at the stage soon-enough where models are "good enough" for 99% of people's needs. The SOTA will keep on marching ever-onwards I am sure, but I would not be surprised if people stick with previous-gen/previous-previous-gen/etc models because why upgrade?

If this does play out like this, I do wonder how that works out for the frontier labs (specifically OpenAI and Anthropic, less so Meta & Google) - if open models or even just cheaper Sonnet-level models from a few generations ago are good enough for basically everyone's daily work, where is the revenue? how can you justify pumping billions and billions into new generation models and datacenters etc when there is no driving need to use them?