Igor is correct. It makes me realize again how wrong people are about the Western Frontier. These companies don't overhype themselves; they hide their strength, bide their time. Thus "DeepSeek moment" and such. They raise billions, spend billions, and let you think them wasteful.
> genuinely believe that frontier labs have some insurmountable lead in that area
I'm curious where you did get that impression from?
I genuinely believe that frontier labs have: 1) better pretrain, that is, "smarter" model per param, both active and total 2) more efficient inference stack 3) in general, bigger and more diverse RL envs that are, among other things, better aligned with average use cases on their platform. (maybe there are more, sry i'm playing a video game rn and can't sit and think for long)
This (esp #3) does not mean one can't be better in a particular domain than frontier lab.
it is true, though, that before GLM-5.2 release, I wouldn't have given a high probability that the model would be better than GPT-5.5 in kernel-related tasks.
But then I wouldn't consider just one fresh bench to rule out on the general capability in this domain; we'll have to wait.