I think it is a problem, for OpenAI. If their answer to "which of your models are better" is to throw their hands in the air and say "fuck if we know, go figure it out yourself" then that's going to go poorly as soon as they try to actually sell to some of the market they're predicting they can sell to.

Whether they train the biggest model first or not is not relevant; what matters is what they release. Right now we've got 6.1 Sol and 6.0 Astra. Over at Anthropic they've got Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1. The existence of a hypothetical Fable 5.5 that I'm not allowed to use doesn't help me.