It's crazy that a ~400 person side project by a Chinese firm can put up such a fight.
All other models are also either by <1k labs or side hustles by tech companies who are not particularly known for LLMs
Not really. Anthropic’s headcount isn’t huge, and only a subset of their employees are working on the frontier. It’s also easier when you’re a follower.
Their success is subsidized heavily by distillation, and even then, the Big Labs are no more than an OOM larger.