How much better are the internal, unreleased models at frontier labs like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic?
We got a glimpse exactly one year ago today, when Google accidentally leaked the “Kingfall” model
"Kingfall" was likely an unreleased Gemini 2.5 Ultra-sized model. It was available in AI Studio for only a few minutes but remained accessible through the API for several days
At the time, "Kingfall" appeared to be significantly better than Gemini 2.5 Pro at both code generation and creative writing
In a recent interview, Sundar Pichai mentioned that Google could have made a better, Ultra-sized Gemini Omni model, but would have had trouble serving it
The infrastructure required to serve Ultra-sized models at scale is likely why Google never publicly released models like “Kingfall”