The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken

Simon Willison:

Four weeks ago, GPT-4 remained the undisputed champion: consistently at the top of every key benchmark, but more importantly the clear winner in terms of “vibes”. Almost everyone investing serious time exploring LLMs agreed that it was the most capable default model for the majority of tasks—and had been for more than a year.

Today that barrier has finally been smashed. We have four new models, all released to the public in the last four weeks, that are benchmarking near or even above GPT-4. And the all-important vibes are good, too!

Those models come from four different vendors.