I don't think that xAI is THAT far from being a frontier lab. Ryan Shea estimates it to be three moths behind, not seven months behind as Zvi was informed by Wildeford. Additionally, Grok 4.20 was released in March. Had xAI been seven months behind, it would be equivalent to a model as capable as the leaders had in August 2025 with xAI having been a leader in early July. And yet we see Grok 4.20 close to the frontiers[1] of ARC-AGI-2 and ARC-AGI-1. I wish that someone actually checked every model on as many benchmarks as they can so that we would quickly learn the capabilities of neglected labs like xAI.
P.S. There are also Grok 5 and Claude Mythos, but they have yet to be released and benchmarked (by what benchmarks?) I am not even sure that Claude Mythos will emerge three months earlier than Grok 5.
For comparison, the performance of Grok 4 on the benchmark was replicated no later than by GPT-5.1 released on November 12 (or was it GPT-5-pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 released in August and late September?) meaning that even gaming the benchmark was unlikely to cause xAI to obtain more than 4 months of a false lead.