I think OpenAI is currently in this position where they are still industry standard, but also not leading. Deepseek R1 beat o1 on perf/cost with similar perf at

I think OpenAI is currently in this position where they are still industry standard, but also not leading. Deepseek R1 beat o1 on perf/cost with similar perf at a fraction of the cost. o3-mini is judged as ”weird” and quite hit and miss on coding (basically the sole reason for its existence) with a sky high SimpleQA hallucination rate due to its limited scope, probably beat by Sonnet 3.7 by a fairly large margin. Still, being early with a product and still often ”good enough” still takes them a long way. I think GPT-5 and where their competition will be then will be quite important for OpenAI though. I think the signs on the horizon is that everyone will close up on each other as we hit the diminishing returns, so the underlying business model, integrations, enterprise reach, marketing and market share will probably be king rather than the underlying LLM in 2026. Since GPT-5 is meant to select the best model behind the scenes, one issue might be that users won’t have the same confidence in the model, feeling like it’s deciding for them or OpenAI tuning it to err on the side of being cheap.