The Decoder's framing is fair, but the real story here isn't the 97.5% — it's the 49.8% under a standard harness. A 48-point swing from test setup alone suggests ARC-AGI-3 scores measure scaffolding as much as raw capability, which muddies clean comparisons between labs. Google closing the frontier gap is genuinely notable after months of trailing OpenAI, yet the reported weakness in math and software engineering hints at benchmark-specific tuning rather than across-the-board progress. On our view, this is a solid step, not a breakthrough — headline AGI-benchmark numbers deserve skepticism until independent harnesses reproduce them. Expect labs to keep optimizing for whichever leaderboard is hot that quarter, and readers should track the gap between best-case and standard setups as the more honest metric.