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Comment by pseudosavant

7 hours ago

It is fascinating to me to see a new product category that improves so vastly year-after-year, where people commonly state that this is now the peak already.

I couldn’t even imagine having to go back to a model from 12 months ago, much less 24 months ago. GPT-5.5 is so much better than GPT-4o that it sure seems like they keep finding new juice to squeeze.

This is like going from dialup internet to DSL and acting like it has peaked before gigabit cable and fiber come along. We are at the beginning of hardware truly made for AI.

> I couldn’t even imagine having to go back to a model from 12 months ago, much less 24 months ago. GPT-5.5 is so much better than GPT-4o that it sure seems like they keep finding new juice to squeeze

The difference in progress in smaller models is far more impressive.

Compare Gemini 3.5 Flash to a ~16B parameter model from 24 months ago.

Compare GPT-5.5 to a frontier model 24 months ago.

Yes, GPT-5.5 got better. At orders of magnitude smaller parameter sizes (when factoring in ACTIVE parameters) the increase is far more pronounced.

  • Totally agree on smaller models making even more impressive gains. Gemini 3.5 Flash is better than the biggest SOTA model from 24 months ago, not just a 16B parameter one. GPT-4o came out 24 months ago, and there is no way I'd choose that over Gemini 3.5 Flash today.

Yeah sure but is it so much better than Codex-GPT-5.3? No, if anything it's probably a little bit worse.

  • GPT-5.3-Codex came out in February, and GPT-5.5 came out in April. How much better do you expect in two month's time? What other products can you think of that get meaningfully better in that short of a time frame?

    And as good as 5.3 Codex is at writing code, 5.5 is easily just as good, if not better. But 5.5 is more than a one trick pony and it is much better at planning, writing copy, documentation, etc. I can choose to run 5.3-Codex instead of 5.5, but I never ever do.