He's back, and working 60 hour weeks, since 2023, according to this report.

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.