Occam’s razor tells me it’s probably because it’s not good. Perhaps running a company like survivor in a pressure cooker is not an effective management strategy.
I'm guessing both openai and anthropic have transitioned to prompt magic and fine tuning rather than try to keep building LLMs at scale. The fact that QWEN and other models are impressive, small and perfectly suitable for most work means every dollar you're spending on trying to train larger models is a losing prop.
> every dollar you're spending on trying to train larger models is a losing prop
You probably don’t know how smaller models are trained then. Most of them are knowledge distilled or trained using data generated from larger models. If larger models are stopped there is no magical way smaller models will keep getting better.