The Frontier Stopped Being the Model

The May 12, 2026 alphaXiv trending feed has zero new-model papers in the top twenty. The unit of progress in AI has moved out of the pretrain and into the loop — distillation pipelines, self-evolving agent runtimes, discovered test-time procedures. This piece argues the frontier-lab moat shrinks to the distillation step, with three falsifiable predictions for the next twelve months.