Claude is not cheap, why is it far and away the most popular if it's not top 10 in performance?

Qwen3 235b ranks highest on these benchmarks among open models, but I have never met someone who prefers its output over Deepseek R1. It's extremely wordy and often gets caught in thought loops.

My interpretation is that the models at the top of ArtificialAnalysis are focusing the most on public benchmarks in their training. Note I am not saying XAI is necessarily nefariously doing this, could just be that they decided it's better bang for the buck to rely on public benchmarks than to try to focus on building their own evaluation systems.

But Grok is not very good compared to the anthropic, openai, or google models despite ranking so highly in benchmarks.

Mistral has been consistently last place, or at least last place among ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, and Gemini/Gemma.

I know this because I had to use a permissive license for a side project and I was tortured by how miserably bad Mistral was, and how much better every other LLM was.

Need the best? ChatGPT

Need local stuff? Llama(maybe Gemma)

Need to do barely legal things that break most company's TOS? Mistral... although deepseek probably beats it in 2025.

For people outside Europe, we don't have patriotism for our LLMs, we just use the best. Mistral has barely any usecase.

Thats ummm extremely cheap.