As China’s AI race accelerates, ‘model fatigue’ becomes the next challenge | South China Morning Post

September 22 was, on paper, the busiest afternoon in the history of artificial intelligence: Xiaomi livestreamed the training run of its MiMo-V2.6 model, Anthropic unveiled its frontier Opus 5.5, and OpenAI released not one but two models — GPT-6 Sol and Luna — within hours of each other. Three headline events, one day, and the analysts' verdict is apparently "model fatigue." Not a technical fault. Not a safety incident. Just a vague ennui, which is what happens when you hold a fireworks display every night and then act surprised that nobody looks up.

The livestream is the tell. Xiaomi broadcasting a training run is the AI equivalent of a restaurant letting you watch the potatoes boil — theatrical transparency, staged for a news cycle that can no longer absorb what it is fed, and when every fortnight produces a fresh numbered checkpoint, the numbers stop meaning anything. OpenAI's naming department has evidently given up and reached for the sky: Sol and Luna sound less like frontier systems than two moons nobody has bothered to catalogue. Opus 5.5 arrives with a decimal point, which is what you attach to a product when you have run out of names but not out of quarterly targets.

The honest reading of "model fatigue" is that it describes a supply problem the labs built on purpose and are now complaining about. Ship fast, hold the spotlight for thirty-six hours, ship again. In that churn, nobody finishes a serious evaluation, no regulator reads past the press release, and the only parties genuinely delighted are the ones renting out compute by the hour. Meanwhile the one question worth asking — is any of this measurably better than last quarter's version — is drowned out by the fanfare of the next launch. Somewhere in Shenzhen and San Francisco alike, a product manager is drafting the blog post for the upgrade that will make this upgrade forgettable.