alt Hacker NewsThe difference now is that they've hit the "good enough" point. LLMs are a tool, and that tool is useful but not incredibly valuable unto itself.
To make a manufacturing analogy - ChatGPT was a manual machining mill, and in the years after we've gone from that to a 3-axis CNC mill. Now we've added a 4th and 5th axis, which is great for the 2% of parts that need that functionality. But the big win was that initial jump from manual control to CNC. Why would I pay an extra $2 million for my CNC machine when I could just design my parts to be simpler to produce instead? The AI labs are trying to make these incredibly complex tools, but the market doesn't want/need them so they're competing on price for the tools that people do use. By selling their metaphorical CNC machines for half of what they cost to produce.
Oh, and we've bet the entire economy on the hope that fancier CNC machines will magically solve all our problems in all industries, from healthcare to the legal system.
So - will AI progress continue to improve? Sure. Will we continue lighting money on fire in order to make it happen? That remains to be seen.
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This is how I feel about it. I've stopped looking at all the scores of new releases and just look at the price to see how much usage I can get in a month. Seems like I'm not the only one either, from comments above like
> "Opus 5.5 is so good that I don't want it to be replaced anytime soon. Stop training models[...]"_
>The difference now is that they've hit the "good enough" point.
In some aspects sure, but in others no. Open AI's goal is to build "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." and Astra was a big jump in that. There still isn't a better model for computer use and vision/spatial work. Driving, Operating Robots, Video Editing, 3D modelling, graphics are all things Astra was >>> at than any other model. I'm sure you don't care about any of that so it's easy enough to slip by you but this analogy - "Now we've added a 4th and 5th axis, which is great for the 2% of parts that need that functionality." is dead wrong.