Both Anthropic and OpenAI don't want to continue training models indefinitely.

Anthropic CEO has expressed potentially slowing down on model training. There is little return for billions of dollars burnt for 1-2% increase on various benchmarks. These companies profit via inference.

Not to mention, the whole Fable being banned by the US Gov is a scary prospect for future models. What is the point of spending billions if its going to get blocked?

Of course this can't go on forever. Especially not on LLMs. But are we really close to the limits of what these LLMs can do? I'm not sure we are.

The difference between GPT-5/Opus 4 and GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8 is striking. For software development anyway, there's no comparison. And all this has happened in a year.

My assumption is there will be another 2-3 years of improvements ahead of us on LLMs alone. Through hardware upgrades, larger training runs, better data quality, better algorithms, etc.

Of course, by then these models will be quite expensive. Will my company pay for it? I don't know. I'm sure some people will though.