In intelligence/performance. It's admittedly a fuzzy notion. Most benchmarks will probably show decreasing gains between generations. Similar to time/space complexity, trying to debate about what performance/intelligence is will get into a million definitions, caveats and technicalities. But a relative comparison between inputs and outputs is gives us useful information.
The inputs - data, compute and parameters - going into training these models have grown by many orders of magnitude between each gen. There's a lot of fuzziness about how much better each gen has gotten, but clearly 4 is not many orders of magnitude better than 3 by any reasonable definition. This mental model isn't useful to say how good each gen is, but it is quite useful to see the trend and make long term predictions.
The inputs - data, compute and parameters - going into training these models have grown by many orders of magnitude between each gen. There's a lot of fuzziness about how much better each gen has gotten, but clearly 4 is not many orders of magnitude better than 3 by any reasonable definition. This mental model isn't useful to say how good each gen is, but it is quite useful to see the trend and make long term predictions.