Another day, another frontier-level release—welcome to the world, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. And yet, the churn of model announcements increasingly feels like background noise. For the past two years, conversations about AI have fixated on which model is best: who has the most parameters, who trained on the biggest cluster, whose benchmarks are highest… But do these improvements really matter anymore?

Ordinarily, when an article poses a rhetorical question, the safe bet is: “No.” But that’s not actually the case here—new models do matter. Yet for most businesses and consumers, the impact today is modest at best.