In some YT talk it was explained quite well: AI is not just progressing in one field, its progressing in a lot of fields in parallel.
Before Opus 5.0, anything with 3d was not doable at all. Starting with Opus 5, it can build you cloth simulators and more.
Yes, but what's interesting here is that everything didn't get better. The original "interesting" for transformers was that a translation AI turned out to also be good at generating novel prose. But if we now need to focus to train new capabilities into the models and those don't yield better behavior everywhere then we're no longer in the "free lunch" period of LLMs.