I know what you're saying, but modulo things like losing track of what year it is as time passes by, a current frontier model is going to continue to be useful for many tasks for many years, even moreso if it's 5-10x faster due to the chip architecture.

It's not that it would be the best forever, it's that it would be useful for plenty long enough to be worthwhile, even if there was better stuff available. In exactly the same way that this computer I'm typing this message on is not the latest and hottest cutting edge stuff. A 7 year old CPU, 7 year old Intel integrated graphics, an older NVMe disk, a mere 32GB of RAM... ok, that's one spec that's still pretty modern although it is slower RAM... but it's still plenty fast enough to comment on HN, even these seven years after it was cutting edge.

> but it's still plenty fast enough to comment on HN, even these seven years after it was cutting edge

While it’s still too early to tell, I don’t think that’s how intelligence scales. Better models get you better solutions even to trivial problems. The ceiling for getting it done better is very high even if you’re not doing anything complicated. And difficulty isn’t uniformly distributed anyway - it seems to me that “mostly simple” tasks often have annoying 1% tails that low-intelligence models struggle with. I think we’ll see people chasing the top models for quite a while, or indefinitely - depending on the cost curve.