[atleastoptimal]

Are you using the free version of ChatGPT, or just 4o?

Whatever model is cheap to provide inference for free is irrelevant when it comes to discussing SOTA AI capabilities and their impact. The state of the art has been reliably improving markedly over the past 3 years. o3, Claude opus 4, gemini-2.5 all surpass their predecessors in every benchmark and indicate that improvement isn't slowing down.

If GPT-5 comes out and it's somehow worse then I'll concede to your point, but so far the claim that the latest models are getting worse is mere speculation and makes no sense given that most labs are already aware of the potential for data contamination and such and have taken measures to ensure high data quality for the models they're spending hundreds of millions to train.