Have we gotten major advancements in the last ~year? Not being facetious, genuinely asking. I don't see it from my end but then again I don't really use much more than ChatGPT a couple times a week.
I think the major advancements are outside the textbox in this last year: video generation, robotic models like Helix, world models, Genie 3.
Even for text, Deepseek R1 was this year, and agentic and coding AI has made progress on length/complexity of tasks. The rise of MoE architecture in the open/local model space has made it possible to run useful models locally on hardware under like $2K, something I didn’t expect for a long time.
In the last ~year, we’ve gotten reasoning models, coding agents, much better multimodal capabilities, usable video models, huge context windows, huge decreases in cost, tons of advances in open source models, and I’m sure a lot more I’m not thinking of. I use AI both to code and to deliver value to my (non-tech) customers, and the last year has been awesome for me.
The difference in coding ability between then and now is pretty huge. And a year ago o1 hadn’t been introduced yet, whereas now the “reasoning” technique is pretty widespread.
Not sure if you’re counting things built on top of the models but if so, coding agents have also come a long way since a year ago.
