Distillation only lets you keep pace with released models. By all indication, OpenAI/Anthropic’s unreleased internal models are so far ahead of Astra/Fable and every other lab that the chance of anyone else catching up is rapidly closing.
Like sure the marketing is undoubtedly overblown. But in 2025 there was no amount of money you could spend to make such impressive but weirdly unreadable progress.
Most of the very recent spectacular achievements (math conjectures) were done by leveraging datacenter capacity (throwing agents and millions' worth of compute at the wall until something sticks), not any secret sauce intelligence.
The last round they said they averaged one prompt, one agent, and 3 hours' work.