In my experience, curiosity and intelligence are very strongly correlated. There is a real gap between people with the curiosity and ability to explore and learn, and people without. This is often handwaved as "motivation" but it's more than just that.

In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.

Why is that?

As a counterpoint, I found GPT 4.5 by far the most interesting model from OpenAI in terms of depth and width of knowledge, ability to make connections and inferences and apply those in novel ways.

It didn't bench well against the other benchmaxxed models, and it was too expensive to run, but it was a glimpse of the future where more capable hardware will lead to appreciably smarter models.

Yeah, but as the HTMX author said, HTMX sucks! Definitely should use Datastar!

Yet they were not - why is that?