I'm astonished at the stickiness of chatgpt though. It's clearly not the best platform/model but all my none tech friends just equate LLMs = ChatGPT (4o as well).

It just benefitted from the Kleenex/Google effect due to being the first real mainstream breakthrough of GPT tech among average users ("normies").

I expect, whether OpenAI is even still around in 15+ years or not, that my grandparents will continue telling me about "that ChatGPT" well into the future.

o3/o3-pro is probably the best model, or very close to being the best model, overall. It beats Grok 4 in writing/composition and analysis tasks. [1] Performance is a toss-up between o3 and Claude 4 Opus, but I find o3 easier to interact with and more trustworthy. (Less likely to push back against requests and more likely to attempt to fulfill them in good faith.)

4.5 is also great for certain things. Of all models, it's the second best writer. (DeepSeek R1 is the best prose stylist, surprisingly!)

[1] - This is Grok 4: https://x.com/i/grok/share/e51O9rK0W7UaIN81nFBQoJDSs

This is o3-pro, same question: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68710185cf04819185dc25233280e46b

o3 made fewer mistakes and drafted a more neatly structured and better written output.

No criticism, but I'm continually surprised how many comparisons leave out Gemini.