You absolutely have not been paying attention then. The difference in quality between September 2025 LLMs (GPT-5, Claude 4/4.5) and September 2024 (we were still on GPT-4o) is huge.

For one thing, last year's LLMs were nowhere near winning gold on collegiate math and programming competitions. That's because the "reasoning" thing hadn't kicked off yet - the first model to demonstrate that trick was o1 in ... OK that was September 12th 2024 so it just makes it to a year old now.