AI Reports · MIT FutureTech · 2026-10-17 · Blog / commentary
3 Questions: Is there a "secret sauce" in AI development? The implicit assumption is that leading labs possess some proprietary advantage, a "secret sauce" that separates their models from the rest. B
A new study analyzing training and benchmark data for 809 large language models released from 2022 to 2025 found that at the frontier, 80 to 90 percent of performance is explained by scale alone. Away from the frontier, proprietary techniques and algorithmic advances matter considerably more.