I don't think that refutes the point. I'd readily agree with the parent that in terms of actual usefulness and efficiency gains, we're on a trajectory of diminishing returns.
The point made by the parent seems to be pretty much the opposite of that. They conceded more tooling but questioned the improvements “at the foundational model level”.
This is a ridiculous statement. A simple example of the huge difference is context size.
GPT-4 was, what, 8K? Now we’re in the millions with good retention. And this is just context size, let alone reasoning, multimodality, etc.