It begs an interesting question as well: are frontier labs stuck in the incumbent phase of the "innovator's dilemma," where there's such intense pressure to maintain the flavor/character of their widely-loved existing models, that they dare not invest their resources into radical reimagination of their approach towards architectures for smaller models? A company like Moonshot does not have this cultural limitation.

The frontier labs would be well served in carving out 20k sub-clusters and giving research teams carte blanche in building things with radically different architectures - with full permission to distill whatever they want from the flagship models. We'd expect to see more product lines that feel "different" from the flagship models if this were already being done.