Especially, looking at these numbers after Claude Mythos, feels like either Anthropic has some secret sauce, or everyone else is dumber compared to the talent Anthropic has
I think it’s unrealistic to expect them to come back from that pit to the top in one year, but I wouldn’t rule them out getting there with more time. That’s a possible future. They have the money and Zuckerberg’s drive at the helm. It can go a long way.
If they actually matched Opus 4.6 on such a short timeline, it would have been mighty impressive. (Keep in mind this is a new lab and they are prohibited from doing distills.)
Meta's performance process is essentially "show good numbers or you're out." So guess what people do when they don't have good numbers? They fudge them. Happens all across the company.
Their whole "training the LLM to be a person" technique probably contributes to its pleasant conversational behavior, and making its refusals less annoying (GPT 5.2+ got obnoxiously aligned), and also a bit to its greater autonomy.
Overall they don't have any real moat, but they are more focused than their competition (and their marketing team is slaying).
For example, Claude has a "turn evil in response to reinforced reward hacking" behavior which is a fairly uniquely Claude thing (as far as I've seen anyhow), and very likely the result of that attempt to imbue personhood.
Might as well not release anything.
Yup, it's called test-time compute. Mythos is described as plenty slower than Opus, enough to seriously annoy users trying to use it for quick-feedback-loop agentic work. It is most properly compared with GPT Pro, Gemini DeepThink or this latest model's "Contemplating" mode. Otherwise you're just not comparing like for like.
Why can't others easily replicate it?