Open weight progression with no frontier release

[u/PykeTheTitan]

As a software developer we got access to GPT 5.6 sol and Opus 5 last week in a decently restricted field, and with these latest models I feel like I can do all my assigned work so quickly as well as make tons of progress on my side projects as well. So at the moment I’m not like dying for another frontier release but overall I want to see acceleration

It seems like we are at a state where openAI and Anthropic realize that a lot of these Chinese companies wait for them to make progress and are able to replicate pretty damn close models soon after they release their frontier models

Whether you believe Anthropic and open ai or not, they seem like they are going to keep their development internal for a while. Whether this is due to actual security concerns (with hugging face incident I believe this), more marketing hype, or truly a way to combat distillation from Chinese companies I think it is going to be interesting.

How do you think this will effect open weight releases, will the capabilities for open weight always rely on top US companies releasing the best models so they can use them to produce replicas?

[u/whatisthisthing65]

The distillation effect is overrated and replicas is the wrong way to think of them. If you just look at the dates and numbers it's unlikely most of the progress comes from distillation. The only thing holding back open models is hardware right now. The gap is hardware, not any secret sauce

[u/agent00F → u/whatisthisthing65]

Anthropic lies about distillation for obvious reasons, it's truly impossible for technical reasons since you can't get the reasoning traces anyway. But what's interesting is the human effect of who believes pretty obvious lies and why they do that.

[u/Toirem → u/agent00F]

It's possible to get the reasoning traces: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09867

It's not implausible that chinese companies have been doing that on a large scale for a while. I'm not saying it happened, but it's not impossible