If you look at the difference in quality between gpt-2 and 3, it feels like a big step, but the difference between 5.2 and 5.4 is more massive, it's just that they're both similarly capable and competent. I don't think it's an S curve; we're not plateauing. Million token context windows and cached prompts are a huge space for hacking on model behaviors and customization, without finetuning. Research is proceeding at light speed, and we might see the first continual/online learning models in the near future. That could definitively push models past the point of human level generality, but at the very least will help us discover what the next missing piece is for AGI.
For 2026, I am really interested in seeing whether local models can remain where they are: ~1 year behind the state of the art, to the point where a reasonably quantized November 2026 local model running on a consumer GPU actually performs like Opus 4.5.
I am betting that the days of these AI companies losing money on inference are numbered, and we're going to be much more dependent on local capabilities sooner rather than later. I predict that the equivalent of Claude Max 20x will cost $2000/mo in March of 2027.
Huh, that’s interesting, I’ve been having very similar thoughts lately about what the near-ish term of this tech looks like.
My biggest worry is that the private jet class of people end up with absurdly powerful AI at their fingertips, while the rest of us are left with our BigMac McAIs.