Looking back at two years of model releases, from DeepSeek to Astra
A nostalgic thread recounts highlight moments from various model releases, including the belief that GPT Astra 6 would go unbeaten for at least two months.
remember when DeepSeek V3 and R1 dropped b2b and made everyone question what frontier intelligence was supposed to cost? remember when Gemini 2.5 Pro was sitting at the top of basically every leaderboard? remember when we had almost unlimited Opus 4.5 in Antigravity through a $20 Gemini subscription? remember when everyone started calling Gemini 3 Pro design AGI? remember when Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex dropped on the exact same day and both felt like game changers? remember when hardcore GPT-4o fans refused to let that model die and kept begging OpenAI to open source it? remember when MCP was just this weird Anthropic protocol and nobody knew it would end up everywhere? remember when Nano Banana dropped and suddenly Gemini was miles ahead of everyone in imagegen? remember when GPT-5 was the model everyone had been waiting years for? remember when we thought nothing would beat GPT Astra 6 for at least another two months after launch? Absolutely CRAZY how far we've come