OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

A few important things to remember here:

The best engineering minds have been focused on scaling transformer pre and post training for the last three years because they had good reason to believe it would work, and it has up until now.

Progress has been measured against benchmarks which are / were largely solvable with scale.

There is another emerging paradigm which is still small(er) scale but showing remarkable results. That's full multi-modal training with embodied agents (aka robots). 1x, Figure, Physical Intelligence, Tesla are all making rapid progress on functionality which is definitely beyond frontier LLMs because it is distinctly different.

OpenAI/Google/Anthropic are not ignorant of this trend and are also reviving or investing in robots or robot-like research.

So while Orion and Claude 3.5 opus may not be another shocking giant leap forward, that does not mean that there arn't giant shocking leaps forward coming from slightly different directions.

Once we've scraped the internet of its data, we need more data. Robots can take in video/audio data 24/7 and can be placed in your house to record this data by offering services like cooking/cleaning/folding laundry. Yeah, I'll pay $20k to have you record everything that happens in my house if I can stop doing dishes for five years!