in other forms of progress the goal post is pretty clear, I believe it is clear here but need it explained to me, let me know if you can help. what is the metric, how close are we to it.
I mean, I don't think there is one. There's no magic number that's the goal (or well, I suppose in the broadest possible view there's the theoretical maximum efficiency, but that's a long, long way off). In general, better efficiency is better than worse efficiency.
> in other forms of progress the goal post is pretty clear
I'm not sure that's true. Incremental progress is fairly common. A 7nm feature size microchip is generally better than a 10nm one (from the same manufacturer, at least; annoyingly, people are increasingly fudging the numbers there), which in turn was better than a 13nm one and so on, as an example.
Not sure what benchmark to be excited about here aside from progress for the sake of progress