If you believe Yann LeCun and David Silver (and others), there's an architecture wall; maybe labs are starting to see this on the horizon. Maybe the DRAM supply constraints are forcing it.

Are these real step changes - big picture wise, or refinements in RL/agentic orchestration/"taste" and advancements due to bigger models and hardware technology/capacity scaling? If they not, does this tactic - and hardware improvements - continue to scale non-linearly like they need to?

It is clear that whatever does change in each model increment has resulted in meaningfully better end user capabilities (as well as regressions in some areas, honestly), but that doesn't prove anything. I'm not sure what I personally believe, but stating with your full chest that a stall is ridiculous ignores a lot of potential evidence to the contrary.

Stupid example: Astra. Its main improvements are: much much better computer use and 3d modeling capabilities; better subagent orchestration; better and more reliable tool use; slightly worse coding.

This looks to me, from a feature perspective, to be an incremental improvement across several functional areas, plus new features which are unquestionably excellent but are probably the result of RL focus, not magic.

Step change? Ehhhh depends on how you squint. But how many more iterations of this do we have? Are we going to squeeze quintillion parameter transformers into GPUs?