I'm just wondering if it's really the result of impressive innovation, in line with comments saying that Mistral might in the future beat a bankrupt OpenAI due to being more profitable or efficient.

Or if it's more a situation where I could have Opus 5.5 go through recent papers from the Chinese labs to apply these to a new large training run, resulting in a model that performs similarly to Mistral Large 4.

I honestly don't know.