Is there "Secret Sauce'' in Large Language Model Development? (opens in new tab)

arXiv:2602.07238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Do leading LLM developers possess a proprietary ``secret sauce'', or is LLM performance driven by scaling up compute? Using training and benchmark data for 809 models released between 2022 and 2025, we estimate scaling-law regressions with release-date and developer fixed effects. We find clear evidence of developer-specific efficiency advantages, but their importance depends on where models lie in the performance distribution. At the frontier,...