Why Astra keeps beating rivals days after they launch
The poster asks why each new model beats the other lab's model launched just days earlier, and concludes benchmarks are vanity metrics.
I have a genuine question. Anthropic has probably been working on Fable 5.1 for a very long time. OpenAI has probably been working on GPT-6 Astra for just as long. These labs are almost certainly building in parallel, not reacting to each other in real time of course. So why does Fable 5.1 launch just a couple of days before Astra, and then Astra beats it on almost every benchmark by a good margin? And this isn't a one-off. Every single launch follows the same pattern: when Anthropic ships a new model, it beats all of OpenAI's previous models. When OpenAI ships a new model, it beats all of Anthropic's previous models. Now they are actually beating what the other just launched days earlier. Benchmarks are completely vanity metrics.