> AI development is hitting a wall now

People have been saying this for at least 2 years now.

> token prices are skyrocketing

Today's SotA (fable and astra @ 50$ /Mtok output) are cheaper than o1-preview (sept '24, 60$ /Mtok output).

And other models are workhorses, with much better capabilities, are at least 1 oom cheaper today than o1-preview. (I'm using this model, since it was the first "thinking" model)

> it feels impossible for this approach to do something like

The models have just provided lean proofs for FLT (a ~1M$ project that was expected to take a human expert ~5 years to complete) and a Millennium prize problem. These are current, relevant, and previously unsolved problems. The obsession people have with "proving relativity from stone-age data" is just moving the goalposts.

No one spend ~10 mil USD using gpt 5.1 to solve a millenium prize problem with similar solutions in the training data. So we have no reference for whether 5.1, with that training data and that amount of moeny, could likewise produce such a solution.

For each generation of advancement the "AI psychosis" of the previous wave wears off. Those who believed 4.6's reasoning was an accurate account of its behaviour; those who believed it had goals and solved useful problems reliably; and so on -- now, attribute only these things to Fable. And no doubt when Fable 6 comes along, it will be only v. 6 that does that.

We have seen fairly marginal progress in LLM reliability and performance since the meaningful start of the high-inference/high-reasoning harness era. It just takes people a few model version bumps to break out of the addiction loop to realise this.

At some point progress will stall entirely, and a couple years after that the spell will break and people will stop treating LLMs "as AI" in the wide-eyed sense, and start treating them as unreliable tools that map Text->Text -- as they do now with earlier model versions.