I'm confused why they are working on their own frontier models if they are going to be bought by OpenAI anyway. I guess this is something they were working on before the announcement?
Why would OpenAI not let smart people work on models? That seems to be what they do. The point is: They are no longer "their own" models. They are now OpenAI models. If they suck, if they are redundant, if there is no idea there that makes sense, that effort will not continue indefinitely.