> Anyone else find it weird how within 2 months of Fable releasing all the major labs suddenly had Fable-level models?
Frontier model release cycles generally take around 6-8 months anyway. OpenAI and xAI (or however you spell it, branding almost as bad as X/itter) were probably working on their next generation of models already, and Anthropic just beat them 2 months to this release.
You also say "near-concurrent release of the same jump" - but 2 months isn't "near-concurrent", it's a full quarter of the normal release cycle.
I don't think that the other explanations you gave are implausible, though - for both human circulation and distillation, you can apply those during a training and development run (with reduced effectiveness). Reasonable to imagine those as bumping them up another few points to bring competitors from "a little below Fable" to "around Fable".
Frontier model release cycles generally take around 6-8 months anyway. OpenAI and xAI (or however you spell it, branding almost as bad as X/itter) were probably working on their next generation of models already, and Anthropic just beat them 2 months to this release.
You also say "near-concurrent release of the same jump" - but 2 months isn't "near-concurrent", it's a full quarter of the normal release cycle.
I don't think that the other explanations you gave are implausible, though - for both human circulation and distillation, you can apply those during a training and development run (with reduced effectiveness). Reasonable to imagine those as bumping them up another few points to bring competitors from "a little below Fable" to "around Fable".