alt Hacker NewsYes, without a question. Fable 5 and Opus 5.5 are a step-change above what we had before. On the open-weights side, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek 4.1 v1017, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next are all significantly more capable in basically any task you can give them.
You can now have a model work on a task non-stop for a day or more. This was unthinkable 12 months ago, and unstable 6 months ago.
If you are searching for evidence of capability, just look at the amount of projects, blog posts and videos on game remixes, hardware reverse engineering, new compilers and runtimes that has started coming out in the last 6 months. Slop? Sure, but this kind of slop didn't exist at this level 6 or 12 months ago.
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And yet we have to contrast that with reports like this of model capability falling recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50422069
It's really very hard to pin down progress in this domain, companies are definitely targeting benchmarks.
One bit of evidence I would look at is the maths results this last year which have been impressive, that was a huge expensive brute force effort, but it is still good progress.
i am wondering in what potential world would average user or even business user require for model to work on a task for more than a couple of hours? Is assumption that models on average are used to build nextt SpaceX or something?
Are you certain this is from model improvement and not improvements to agents?