In Japan, there has been a long-standing culture of men growing their hair long and tying it up. Although the style changed, this tradition continued until the Edo period. After being influenced by China, a culture also developed of using long hair tied up to secure sacred hats. Given this social context, the style evolved to prevent sweating while maintaining the traditional look. Shaving only a portion of the previous hairstyle minimized the drastic change. When one became a monk, they were isolated from this social context, so maintaining hair was not considered important.
2 new checkpoints of GPT-5.6 were being tested this week at OpenAI, added within a day of each other - kepler and kindle. OpenAI have selected kindle-alpha as their release candidate, sources tell me.
I ran the same prompt on both models, on xhigh, to let you compare yourselves. But on average, in my experience, kindle is a regression vs kepler, although they sometimes produce only variance-expected differences.
I expect 5.6 to launch later this month, so it's still possible they continue refining and drop kindle as RC, given in its current form it would be handily beaten by Mythos.
BREAKING 🔥: A new Claude Mythos 5 model slug has been spotted via Dev Mode.
Claude Mythos is planned to be released as its own model class, besides Haiku, Sonnet and Opus model families.
Soon? 👀