Is progress really a question? It seems very obvious that we have made progress in the last 5 years, and just looking at GANs seems ridiculous when Diffusion Models are sitting right there. Not trying to be a jerk, genuinely curious if anyone actually thinks that progress as a whole is not being made?

I definitely sympathize with the "incremental progress" that comes down to 0.1% better performance on some imperfect metric which occurs between big developments (GANs, transformers, diffusion models), but ignoring those papers and looking at bigger trends it seems obvious that really incredible progress has been made.