Agree with most of this, but:
> In mid-2026, China released Kimi K3, which was equivalent to the best released U.S. model at the time, Claude Fable.
I don't think this was, or is, true: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi... - even from a vibe check alone, it was pretty clear that K3 was missing Fable's special sauce, especially for more hands-on problems.
The Chinese model lag depends on who you ask, but the current estimate seems to be about four months: https://stateofopensource.ai/
> In late 2026 OpenAI/Anthropic will release a tiny model that outperforms their previously-best 2026 model (Astra/Fable), that is priced 10x cheaper
We don't know the sizes of any of these, but GPT Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 are tremendously competitive for their cost, and in some ways beat their larger-sized predecessors. I'd say there's enough doubt that I'd be willing to provide partial points to this claim. (No finetuning, yes.)
The prediction was a 10x price reduction, so equivocating about "we don't know the size" doesn't save their prediction — a 10x price reduction would imply the model was likely more than 10x smaller in parameter count, and the price factored heavily in their prediction (they predicted its low cost would destroy other competition, since no one else could have such a capable model at that low price). And Haiku/Luna are nowhere near competitive with Astra or Fable, which doubly damns their prediction. I'm surprised you would pooh pooh the equivalence of K3 and original-Fable (which has been widely shown across many different benchmarks and even human preference data), while claiming an equivalence between Haiku and Fable!
If you stretch the definition of "previously-best 2026 model" a bit, Haiku 5.5 outperforms Opus 4.6 which was their best at some point in 2026 while being 10x cheaper.
>I don't think this was, or is, true: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi... - even from a vibe check alone, it was pretty clear that K3 was missing Fable's special sauce, especially for more hands-on problems
What special sauce exactly? Refusing to work on any problems remotely connected to biology (including e.g. the book of Genesis)?
>The Chinese model lag depends on who you ask, but the current estimate seems to be about four months: https://stateofopensource.ai/
Benchmaxxing aside, most actual performance is now harness and orchestration dependent and the difference between frontier US and Chinese models is dim as best for virtually all practical tasks. The vast majority of people don't need to solve Navier-Stokes