Agreed, but my suspicion is tied to the timing. Catching up eventually is to be expected. Having similar jumps in capability ready at the same time is odd.
Maybe "readiness" is quite a flexible category? You're mid-training for your next model; a rival releases something; you clear the boards and release the model without completing the training run?
Touche, aborted training runs probably do happen often. Closed model providers have zero incentive to announce a new model with less-than-best benchmarks.
I don’t think the runs need to be aborted… you can just release a mid-training checkpoint!
you'd be crazy to not be taking snapshots on the regular, many good reasons besides failures
Gradual improvements in performance can look like jumps, when you go over critical thresholds.
Combustion engines improved gradually, each year. One year they got better than horses.
There's also a bit of selection bias going on here because we forget about labs that don't have a jump and just focus on the ones that do. Notably Google is definitely not having that capability jump.
brand is their power, they'd be wise to not wreck it with dumb moves or PR statements (they already have some)
the "no moat" stuff is dumb. There are only like 4 companies in the world that have cutting edge LLMs so there is definitely a moat.