Someone on a thread was complaining they haven’t really needed the newer models because Opus 4.6 was good enough.

I had to remind them 4.6 only came out February this year. In a normal world 4.6 is a newer model! A model 6 months old is seen as ancient!

Reminds me a lot of the race for clock speed when I was a kid. We just took it for granted that it was going to keep increasing, but CPUs sat at roughly 1-2GHz for a long time, or at least that's how it seemed. The slowdown and pause was fairly noticeable. The current release cadence is unsustainable. It might be that we're getting close to the AI equivalent of 1-2GHz CPUs, and it takes years of incremental progress to push further.