> they're largely using distillation techniques. Which means they'll always be catching up and never at the cutting edge.

You link to an assumption, and one that's seemingly highly motivated.

Have you used the Chinese models? IMO Kimi K2.5 beats everything but Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1... and it's not exactly inferior to the latter, it's just different. It's much better at most writing tasks, and its "Deep Research" mode is by a wide margin the best in the business. (OpenAI's has really gone downhill for some reason.)

Have you tried the OpenAI deep research in the past week or so? It's been updated to use 5.2 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2021299935678026168

(I work at OpenAI, but on the infra side of things not on models)