its beneficial to check it
HN is full of people who tried the free version of ChatGPT a couple of years ago, got a load of random hallucinated slop, and concluded it was all a bunch of useless hype. They enjoy parroting a lot of obsolete stuff they read once about stochastic parrots, without the slightest sense of irony.
When I was growing up, my old man recalled engineers who reacted the same way to transistors, which sucked even more than early-generation LLMs when they first came out. Most of them got over vacuum tubes eventually, though. So will most of the HN'ers, likely including you.
Every generation has at best been a 5% improvement, and nothing revolutionary compared to the last generation. Absolutely no significant improvements between me selecting say Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Claude Sonnet 4, or Claude Sonnet 4.5. Still the same somewhat useful tool for specific purposes, still not good enough to be let loose on production, still not better than what I can do myself with 10 or so years of experience.
Genuinely useful from time to time? Sure, I agree completely. Anywhere near being revolutionary enough as people here insist on gaslighting themselves to be? Absolutely not. Not even remotely.
What's really different now is that LLMs have become useful research tools. Three or four years ago, models couldn't cite their sources at all. Two or three years ago, they started to gain the capability, but a large proportion of the citations would either be hallucinated or irrelevant. About a year ago, significant improvements started to emerge. At this point, I can give Gemini 3 Pro or GPT 5.2 Pro a multilayered research task, and end up with a report indistinguishable in accuracy and bibliographic quality from what a good human might produce in a couple of weeks.
It might take a half hour to get the answer, and I'm not sure if you could get the same result at the $20/month level, but the hype and promises we started hearing a couple of years ago are starting to bear fruit. The research models are now capable of performing at grad-student level. Not all the time, and not without making stuff up on occasion... but to argue that no progress at all has been made is nothing more or less than moon-landing denial.
