When it's "that's why they incremented the version by a tenth instead of a half" you know things have really started to slow for the large models.

Opus 4 came out 10 weeks ago. So this is basically one new training run improvement.

And in 52 weeks we've gone 3.5->4.1 with this training improvement, meanwhile the 52 weeks prior to that were Claude -> Claude 3. The absolute jumps per version delta also used to be larger.

I.e. it seems we don't get much more than new training run levels of improvement anymore. Which is better than nothing, but a shame compared to the early scaling.

Is it really a bigger jump to go from plausible to frequently useful, than from frequently useful to indispensable?

Why is there supposed to be no step between frequently useful and indispensable? Quickly going from nothing to frequently useful (which involved many rapid hops between) was certainly surprising, and that's precisely the lost momentum.

They released this because competitors are releasing things