Unfortunately it is this long. I know people in academia studying human-AI interfaces and up until recently they were still using gpt-3.5.

Yes and let's all remember that lag when the studies about AI outcomes are posted.

Why? Seems like an appropriate counterbalance to be insane promises and moon shots that CEOs are promising

It's challenging to keep running experiments. In a perfect world, we would run our experiments again and update the results. But some experiments are expensive, and some experiments are inherently difficult to reproduce. I have a paper nearing completion that involves interaction between trained (human) professionals and a model. It was a logistical challenge to bring those people together (also, we had to pay them), and the roleplaying that we asked LLMs to do can't be done anymore--they refuse for safety reasons. Stuff like this is pretty common.

I am hopeful that we can eventually move to open weights models, but at the time we did the experiments, the open weights models did not have the capabilities we needed. The ever-shifting sands of frontier models makes reproducibility difficult, and not just for scientists.

> Is the publishing cycle this long?

I did a PhD and the answer is yes. Often longer than this.