It doesn’t call it into question- they’re not. OpenAI has been bleeding researchers since the Anthropic split (and arguably their best ones, given Claude vs GPT-4o). While Google should have all the data in the world to build the best models, they still seem organizationally incapable of leveraging it to the their advantage, as was the case with their inventing Transformers in the first place.
I'm not sure placing first in Chatbot Arena is proof of anything except being the best at Chatbot Arena, it's been shown that models that format things in a visually more pleasant way tend to win side by side comparisons.
In my experience doing actual work, not side by side comparisons, Claude wins outright as a daily work horse for any and all technical tasks. Chatbot Arena may say Gemini is "better", but my reality of solving actual coding problems says Claude is miles ahead.
