anyone else notice labs are getting more secretive about their best models?

Something shifted recently and i can't stop thinking about it. the trend used to be: new model drops, blog post goes up, everyone gets access on day one. now it feels like the most capable stuff is quietly going behind walls with "restricted access" or gated research programs, while the public-facing releases are. fine, but clearly not the frontier. google dropped gemma 4 open-weight and it's genuinely good - MoE architecture, strong reasoning, apache license. meta's doing multimodal reasoning stuff that's impressive.