Not everyone is operating with the same constraints. As for me, once the models got good enough (~opus 4.5 levels of intelligence) that they could solve most problems that I was dealing with, I stopped following the frontier intelligence trajectory for daily use and instead followed constant intelligence and decreasing cost. Nowadays I primarily use GPT 6.1 luna, and DeepSeek 4.1 flash.

I've also been very happy playing around with qwen 3.8 27b running locally for personal projects. It sometimes can't quite get there, and that's when I'll reach for GPT.