The way that Mythos is likely being used to train these publicly available models, I wonder if there will always be a private, mostly/wholly internal model that is significantly ahead technically but is reserved for internal or "VIP" use.
Confidently yes. OpenAI for sure has been training larger models internally and distilling.
Pre-training scaling laws all support larger models being more cost effeceint to train then smaller models. And distillation is comparably cheap. So you can get the most juice by training the biggest model you can and distilling it.
If there isn’t they’ve obviously missed an important and lucrative market.
In fact, there should be more and more secret tiers for bigger and bigger money.