People underestimate the lead OAI has with their post-5.2 models. The author does not strike me as someone who closely follows the progress frontier labs make in US and around the world.
Agreed, compare the frontier models from Google and OAI. It’s like night and day. Anyone who says “the tech has caught up” has not spent even one day using Gemini 3.1 to try and accomplish something complicated.
It's a joint ignorance of how these frontier models get baked and what consumers want.
Many pundits think it's just a matter of scraping the internet and having a few ML scientists run ablation experiments to tune hyperparameters. That hasn't been true for over a year. The current requirements are more org-scale, more payoff from scale, more moat. The main legitimate competitive threat is adversarial distillation.
Many pundits also think that consumers don't want to pay a premium for small differences on the margin. That is very wrong-headed. I pay $200/month to a frontier lab because, even though it's only a few % higher in benchmark scores, it is 5x more useful on the margin.