> The phrase "frontier model" is starting to mean two things. One is a checkpoint. The other is a system boundary.

LLM-isms aside, I don't think we want this to be the case? An LLM, for all its complexity, is something that can be reasoned about. It's picking the next token, until it hits an EOS. The semantics imposed on those tokens (reasoning ,tool call, etc.) are up to the user('s harness) to decide and act on. The more that's pushed behind the facade, the harder it is achieve sufficient understanding of the model's behavior s.t. one can compose it into larger abstractions. Perhaps the performance (and the adherence to an interface/contract) compensate? But swapping from Opus or 5.5 to this or Fugu seems like a much bigger change than swapping between different 'base' models.

They're applying misdirection so that we use their secret-sauce agentic framework, but like a black box and without seeing any of the internal reasoning patterns, cause that would give it away.

That's a deal-breaker for me. I need as much observability and control over my development workflow as possible; that's part of my secret sauce.

This seems to be a new trend. Noticed it with GPT "ultra" in their announcement[1]. I'm with you, a large language model and a system of many language models working together are not the same thing

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689338

I might be wrong, but strongly suspect that Fable 5 is already something in this shape, considering long time to first token while having normal troughput.