If they make it sound surprising it makes llms look way more capable then they are. So $$$. Highly recommend people spend time with small local models just to see how absolutely unintelligent and deranged llms are and how the smoke and mirrors evolves as they scale up to things like anthropic or what have you.
There is a fair sized gap between the frontier models that you can buy access to, the ones you can run at home and whatever they've got running in house that they haven't released yet.
I am really happy with my local setup and I get a ton of mileage out of it but I'm not under the illusion that it is as good as what I could get by paying OpenAI or Anthropic. It lags the frontier by 6 to 9 months, but that's good enough for me and it makes sure that I don't had over any of my data to outsiders.