Comment by kouteiheika

> It’s such a commodity that there are only 3 SOTA labs left and no one can catch them.

No one can outpace them in improving the SOTA, everyone can catch up to them. Why are open-weight models perpetually 6 months behind the SOTA? Given enough data harvested from SOTA models you can eventually distill them.

The biggest differentiator when training better models are not some new fancy architectural improvements (even the current SOTA transformer architectures are very similar to e.g. the ancient GPT-2), but high quality training data. And if your shiny new SOTA model is hooked into a publicly available API, guess what - you've just exposed a training data generator for everyone to use. (That's one of the reasons why SOTA labs hide their reasoning chains, even though those are genuinely useful for users - they don't want others to distill their models.)