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I'll try to answer this despite not knowing much about the topic. I'll rely on my intuition here, if anyone can poke holes in what I'm about to write, I will try not doing this again in the future.
1: I think the main reason is a "Garbage in, garbage out" problem. We lack better training data, and not just more of it. 2: I think censorship, various modifications to protect against 'attacks', and minor crippling of abilities (with the goal of preventing the models from being able to do immoral or illegal things) have made newer models regress in some ways. 3: I think there's a slight connection to the stagnation of movies, video games, computer programs, and so on. These are also not improving, despite growing resources, team sizes and technology. The direction of optimization, and the direction of what consumers enjoy, seemingly split into two diverging paths. I wouldn't go as far as claiming that the enshittification process has started for AI, but I don't think the focus is purely on capacity anymore, and it's probably not researchers which are in charge anymore (just like most programmers are told what to create by non-programmers, limiting the quality of the outcome). If competent scientists are allowed to work undisturbed with no regard for public perception, advertising or shareholders, I believe they can create something amazing/horrifying rather fast.
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