Here's some insight from Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer's interview with Dwarkesh Patel https://youtu.be/v0gjI__RyCY&t=7390

> When you think about divulging this information that has been helpful to your competitors, in retrospect is it like, "Yeah, we'd still do it," or would you be like, "Ah, we didn't realize how big a deal transformer was. We should have kept it indoors." How do you think about that?

> Some things we think are super critical we might not publish. Some things we think are really interesting but important for improving our products; We'll get them out into our products and then make a decision.

I'm sure each of the frontier labs have some secret methods, especially in training the models and the engineering of optimizing inference. That said, I don't think them saying they'd keep a big breakthrough secret would be evidence in this case of a "secret sauce" on ARC-AGI-2.

If they had found something fundamentally new, I doubt they would've snuck it into Gemini 3. Probably would cook on it longer and release something truly mindblowing. Or, you know, just take over the world with their new omniscient ASI :)