I'm quite sad about the S-curve hitting us hard in the transformers. For a short period, we had the excitement of "ooh if GPT-3.5 is so good, GPT-4 is going to be amazing! ooh GPT-4 has sparks of AGI!" But now we're back to version inflation for inconsequential gains.

2025 is the year most Big AI released their first real thinking models

Now we can create new samples and evals for more complex tasks to train up the next gen, more planning, decomp, context, agentic oriented

OpenAI has largely fumbled their early lead, exciting stuff is happening elsewhere

Take this all with a grain of salt as it's hearsay:

From what I understand, nobody has done any real scaling since the GPT-4 era. 4.5 was a bit larger than 4, but not as much as the orders of magnitude difference between 3 and 4, and 5 is smaller than 4.5. Google and Anthropic haven't gone substantially bigger than GPT-4 either. Improvements since 4 are almost entirely from reasoning and RL. In 2026 or 2027, we should see a model that uses the current datacenter buildout and actually scales up.

I don't feel the S-curve at all yet. Still an exponential for me

Because it will take thousands of underpaid researchers random searching through solution space to get to the next improvement, not 2-3 companies pressed to monetize and enshittify their product before money runs out. That and winning more hardware lotteries.