I’m guessing GPT-5.2 uses a new pretrain, maybe pretraining distillation from the new big (GPT-4.5 class) model that still can’t be released or properly RLVRed due to insufficient compute in the form of NVL72 servers. And GPT-5.4 is a new level of RLVR scaling on top of that pretrain, where GPT-5.2 itself only aspired to mildly exceed GPT-5.1, which might be essentially o3 refined to be less of a lying liar, possibly still based on the same base model as GPT-4o.
With this level of performance for a smaller model, a big model that will be likely released later this year could be significantly stronger than the current best Anthropic and GDM models, though by that time Opus 5 might be out. And Gemini 4 could take advantage of TPUv7 to become by far the largest model yet, but that’s end of 2026, likely after OpenAI releases their big model, so there’s still a window where OpenAI plausibly takes the lead.
I’m guessing GPT-5.2 uses a new pretrain, maybe pretraining distillation from the new big (GPT-4.5 class) model that still can’t be released or properly RLVRed due to insufficient compute in the form of NVL72 servers. And GPT-5.4 is a new level of RLVR scaling on top of that pretrain, where GPT-5.2 itself only aspired to mildly exceed GPT-5.1, which might be essentially o3 refined to be less of a lying liar, possibly still based on the same base model as GPT-4o.
With this level of performance for a smaller model, a big model that will be likely released later this year could be significantly stronger than the current best Anthropic and GDM models, though by that time Opus 5 might be out. And Gemini 4 could take advantage of TPUv7 to become by far the largest model yet, but that’s end of 2026, likely after OpenAI releases their big model, so there’s still a window where OpenAI plausibly takes the lead.