To me, mini releases matter much more and better reflect the real progress than SOTA models.

The frontier models have become so good that it's getting almost impossible to notice meaningful differences between them.

Meanwhile, when a smaller / less powerful model releases a new version, the jump in quality is often massive, to the point where we can now use them 100% of the time in many cases.

And since they're also getting dramatically cheaper, it's becoming increasingly compelling to actually run these models in real-life applications.