I don’t think I’d be this pessimistic. There’s still o3 that hasn’t been seen in its full form, and whatever improvements are made to it now that multi head latent attention is out in the wild.

Orion does seem to have been a failure, but I also find it a bit weird that they seemingly decided to release the full model rather than a distillation, which is the pattern we now usually see with foundation models.

So, did they simply decide that it wasn’t worth the effort and dedicate the compute to other, better things? Were they pushed by sama to release it anyway, to look like they were still making progress while developing something really next gen?