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.

> that does not mean that there arn't giant shocking leaps forward coming from slightly different directions.

Nor does it mean that there are! We've gotten into this habit of assuming that we're owed giant shocking leaps forward every year or so, and this wave of AI startups raised money accordingly, but that's never how any innovation has worked. We've always followed the same pattern: there's a breakthrough which causes a major shift in what's possible, followed by a few years of rapid growth as engineers pick up where the scientists left off, followed by a plateau while we all get used to the new normal.

We ought to be expecting a plateau, but Sam Altman and company have done their work well and have convinced many of us that this time it's different. This time it's the singularity, and we're going to see exponential growth from here on out. People want to believe it, so they do, and Altman is milking that belief for all it's worth.

But make no mistake: Altman has been telegraphing that he's eyeing the exit, and you don't eye the exit when you own a company that's set to continue exponentially increasing in value.