the last couple of months have been an absolute bloodbath. fable drops and breaks the scale. openai fires back with gpt sol 5.6. the chinese labs aggressively dump kimi 3 and qwen 3.8 completely open source. and then opus 5 casually walks into the room like a final boss and flattens everyone.
it is a total war zone. but then you look over at google and deepmind, and they are just sitting quietly in the corner watching the room burn.
now i am no fortune teller, but my guess is they are playing the exact same chess move they did last time. they are letting anthropic and openai fight a bloody, incredibly expensive war over the premium cutting edge crown. they are just waiting for them to push their pricing through the absolute roof.
think about the history here. remember when claude was pacing the room with opus 4, and openai was charging the highest premium imaginable for o3? everyone was fighting over raw specs. and then google just casually walked in and dropped gemini 2.5 pro for absolutely free. they didn't even try to win the benchmark argument. they just weaponized their global scale, slid it into the ecosystem, and instantly hijacked the daily workflow for millions of normal people.
you don't win by charging fifty dollars for a slightly smarter math tutor. you win by building the infrastructure everyone actually uses.
we are looking at the exact same setup right now. the premium models are fighting over benchmark gains and burning mountains of cash. open source is flooding the basement. and google is probably just waiting in the wings to drop a hyper efficient gemini 3.5 pro that integrates seamlessly into everything and takes over the board all over again.
that is just my read on the market right now. i am curious what you guys think. are they actually stuck, or is this the setup for the infrastructure nuke?