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It's a combination of (1) and something you don't list: I think the frontier labs all have multiple generations of undisclosed models in continuous training. T
by zmmmmm 2mo ago
It's a combination of (1) and something you don't list: I think the frontier labs all have multiple generations of undisclosed models in continuous training. There is no "end point" when it's magically "ready". It's just getting better and better all the time. What they release with a name and a version number is just a marketing / branding exercise.
So what you experience as a "near simultaneous" release is just their decision of when to peel off a release from their current set of in-training models, likely based on how they perceive market and regulatory conditions. They likely see a competitor release and then baseline what they should release based on that and it takes a month or two for them to package it up and push it out the door.
What I can imagine is that for some of the labs, they are being forced to publish models closer and closer to the frontier of what they have in training. Effectively, "falling behind" is your forward pipeline shrinking. Google ran out of forward pipeline. So far Anthropic and OpenAI didn't - but probably, one is shrinking.
- ArvidSu 2mo agoThis explanation does so much without leaning into conspiracy that the labs are already sitting on the secret sauce but diluting it for the public or being left mystified when a lab drops out of the race for SoTA
- stingraycharles 2mo agoThat’s not how training pipelines work, and would be extremely wasteful for the biggest cost center as well.
- jluysvi 2mo agoHow about expanding a little instead of just saying "that's not how training pipelines work".
- vorticalbox 2mo agopretty sure at this point no one is retraining from zero they have their big model and they fine tune it. different training makes a different version (agent, info sec etc).
- jychang 2mo agoThe GPT-5.5 and 5.6 Spud pretrain is a fresh pretrain run. OpenAI has the Doug/Astro pretrain coming up next.
- ac29 2mo agoI was under the impression labs released post-training checkpoints fairly often? So Model N/N+1 might literally have had the exact the same pretraining run and only differ on how much/what kind of postraining they got
- simplyluke 2mo agoI've been hearing this myth since ChatGPT came out - that the labs have superAI that they're just slowly trickling out as competition forces them to. Everyone in silicon valley has a cousin who's supposedly seen Anthropic's new unreleased model that changes everything forever. I distinctly recall sitting in a work meeting where a coworker was insisting GPT4 was AGI that anthropic was too scared to release. It's amazing to me that this playbook is still working at least somewhat on folks.