[SwellJoe]

"Are they really the best models?"

Yes. I mean, most people agree they are. I've used all of the serious contenders (well not Grok 4.5, because Musk, and not Meta Spark because Zuck, but everything else I've used on at least a couple of projects to get a feel for them). My experience roughly matches the vibes. But, Fable is remarkable when it doesn't refuse to do the work (which it does, quite a lot, since my areas of interest are security and training specialist models).

Anyway, the vibes strongly indicate Fable is the best model, but not by an amount that is noticeable to most people. You could pick any of the top 10 models on this chart and do most of the tasks most people are doing with models:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence