They don't need to catch up. They just need to be good enough and fast as fuck. Vast majority of useful tasks of LLMs has nothing to do with how smart they are.
GPT-5 models have been the most useless models out of any model released this year despite being SOTA, and it because it slow as fuck.
GPT-5 models have been the most useless models out of any model released this year despite being SOTA, and it because it slow as fuck.