I'm also a happy customer.

But, one thing has been consistent for the past 3 years: After every release from all the serious competitors, the hype can go either way.

As far as the hype cycles go, OpenAI is oscillating between "Best model ever" and "What a letdown, it's over" at least twice a year.

The competition is fierce, and a never-ending marathon of all the players getting ahead just a bit. No clear long-term winner.

5.2 is good. But at this point every few months company A trumps company B with a new “SOTA” (for some definition of SOTA).

OpenAI has no real moat. Anthropic is focusing on developers as a clear target, and Gemini has the backing of Google.

I don’t see OpenAI winning the AI race with marginally better models and arguably a nicer UI/UX (ymmv, but I do like the ChatGPT app experience).

That said, my usage decreases month over month.

Really, I found 5.2 to be a rather weak model. It constantly gives me code that doesn't work and gets simple APIs wrong. Maybe it's just weak on the domain I'm working in.

It hasn't done great in the head-to-head comparisons I've seen, and has trailed in several areas on the leaderboards (though not all).

Based on the 'code red' they declared, this model seems to have been rushed a bit.