I disagree somewhat. I think internally OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are probably all pretty close right now. Argon is competitive with Opus 5.5 and Astra. It might be third, but its competitive at least. Its becoming more apparent that different models are RL'd for different tasks.
Astra (or broadly openAI) are best for mathematics, 3D modeling, and vision.
Opus 5.5 is best at like visual design (or just in general adding more taste and feel)
Now, it can depend on your definition of frontier class model. But Argon is a strong model. Google is not running a distant third. If OpenAI and Anthropic shut down they would have the strongest model on the market in like 2 months imo. Google does suck at shipping (maybe due to an unusual amount of dogfooding models internally?)
And we know all the labs have stronger internal models than their public releases.
Astra (or broadly openAI) are best for mathematics, 3D modeling, and vision. Opus 5.5 is best at like visual design (or just in general adding more taste and feel)
Now, it can depend on your definition of frontier class model. But Argon is a strong model. Google is not running a distant third. If OpenAI and Anthropic shut down they would have the strongest model on the market in like 2 months imo. Google does suck at shipping (maybe due to an unusual amount of dogfooding models internally?)
And we know all the labs have stronger internal models than their public releases.