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  • ThursdAI - Nov 5 - Is it completely over for AI?

    ThursdAI - Nov 5 - Is it completely over for AI?
    2026/11/06
    Hey, Alex here,What a week this has been, not a huge one in terms of new AI releases, but a very significant one in how the world sees and reacts to AI. During the weekend, my timelines were full of hope, and folks reading the “Commanding Heights“ by Will Manidis, outlining a future were AI = the economy.Then, the US midterm elections happened, and if you’ve not been following, a lot of the new folks who got elected, are not in favor of AI. Some call for an outright pause on advanced AI training. As far as datacenter concerns go, around 40 ballot measures called for restrictions on data center buildouts, with Ohio leading with 21 of those.The US capital markets reacted violently, erasing over ~3$ trillion in market value, mostly lead by the tech and chips sectors. So I opened the show today with the question: Is it completely over for AI?I don’t think so, let’s try and make sense of it.AI and Society: The US Midterms results - Is it over for AI?Look we try and stay away from politics on ThursdAI, but when it comes to weeks like this, we pretty much don’t have a choice. The Midterm elections, at least in some sense, put AI, Datacenters and candidates that talk about it, in the spotlight.I’ve mentioned on the show, that messaging in politics is about Hope and Fear. Unfortunately, the folks who got elected, many have made statements, leaning into the fears regular people have about AI. Job replacement, environmental impacts from datacenters, etc.This tweet by Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, had been uplifted by the X algo to 12 million views, and as we all know, the algorithm LOVES controversy and FUD.But, is it really all that bad? Will the democrats get to work and as she suggested “Ban artificial superintelligence”? What does a ban like this even mean when we have Open Source, when Chinese models are catching up to the frontier?Honestly, this was the open question I opened with at the show, and it seems, that at least for now, it’s more posturing than anything else. Yes, there were over 40 ballot measures asking for Datacenter buildout restrictions, but over 21 of them were in Ohio only. It doesn’t seem at all like “the country rejects AI buildout”Additionally, the new Texas Governor, Gina Hinojosa’s position on datacenter is actually very reasonable. She explicitly said that currently permitted datacenter builds in Texas will be allowed to continue, and that the moratoriums on new buildouts will apply only until a few fairly reasonable and sensible conditions will be in place. Note: She’s not saying “NO new buildouts” anywhere.However, moderate takes and reasonable positions are rarely taking center page in the current media landscape, so the bombastic and populist takes are the ones bubbling to the top.So is it over?Highly unlikely, the frontier labs will continue to innovate and push the boundaries of AI forward. Some regulation may come, and as LDJ said, it could be that this mid-term result will actually accelerate innovation, as the labs will potentially try and get more done before the next election cycle.Wolfram’s take is also an interesting one, pausing AI in the US (which is unlikely to happen, as even the folks who got elected will not cede the most powerful tech in the world to China) will not stop AI from being developed elsewhere. Even at current level of capabilities, we can use AI for so much more things, new medical breakthroughs, new algorithms etc that that’s very unlikely to go away.An interesting thing is happening also, that the fears about AI are very populist, and are landing with folks who don’t have any benefit from AI themselves. Most of the world still uses AI as a better / smarter alternative to Google. This is very likely to change in the next year or two, so by the time next election cycle comes around, we’ll be in a completely different scenario.Last second edit: new METR report makes safety folks update their ASI timelinesThis goes into the bucket of “it’s so over, we’re so so back” - Many respected folks in the AI Safety space are now updating their timelines, given what’s “really” going on inside Anthropic. A new report from METR (The independent AI safety institute Anthropic let in) shows that the speed of RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) is much faster than folks previous thought (And anthropic has blocked much of the full report from being published)This is to me a much higher signal about what’s really going on with AI vs the market and the politics hype.The Commanding Heights - who profits from AI (Essay, X)This book from a financier Will Manidis, is a very interesting background to whatever is happening in the markets with AI right now.If you remember Leopolds “Situational Awareness” from 2024 (which to be frank is getting a lot of beating right now in the market), this is the spiritual successor of sorts for the end of 2026.This book looks into the future where AI is the economy, not just part of it, ...
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    1 時間 47 分
  • ThursdAI - Oct 29 - Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1, Anthropic files to go public & more

    ThursdAI - Oct 29 - Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1, Anthropic files to go public & more
    2026/10/29
    Hey, it’s Alex 👋What a week! Gemini 4 Argon was Google’s best model for exactly two weeks. Then Google shipped Gemini 4 Carbon, and it’s the new number 1 in the world. Google is SO back. (when they actually release, it’s waitlisted so far) The other big story is Anthropic’s S-1. For the first time, we get real, audited numbers on what a frontier AI lab looks like as a business. Peter Gostev stayed up making 60+ charts, and we walked through them together on the show.We also had models trying to escape their sandboxes, and Genie 4, which made me think (again) that we live in a simulation.Wolfram and I hosted from the same room for once (meatspace!). Peter, Nisten and LDJ joined remotely. Mert Gulsun from Artificial Analysis joined to talk about their new index, and for From the Forge we had the CoreWeave engineers who are “forward deployed” inside the Aston Martin F1 team! What does that mean? We dive into FDE Google is SO backGemini 4 Carbon - #1 on Artificial Analysis, 2 weeks after Argon (X, X, Sundar)Gemini 4 Carbon scores 59 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That makes it the top model in the world on their brand new index, 1 point ahead of Claude Opus 5.5. It also debuts at #1 on Text Arena and #2 on Agent Arena.Two big models back to back is unusual for Google, after a long stretch of Flash models. There’s no version number either. It’s not Gemini 4.1, it’s just... Carbon. I have no idea why 😅I haven’t seen a Gemini eval chart like this in a long time. Google is finally competing with the full frontier (GPT-6 Astra, Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1), and on most rows it wins.My favorite eval here is Vending Bench from Andon Labs, where the model runs a real vending machine business. Carbon finished with $16,484 in the bank. Opus 5.5 finished with about 9K. LDJ was most impressed by RiemannBench, a very hard math benchmark, where Carbon beats Opus 5.5 by 10 points. Math was supposed to be OpenAI’s turf!Google is pitching Carbon for agentic coding and cybersecurity. The launch price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, which already includes a 50% launch discount. Wolfram loved this. Models are finding security holes that have been there for years, and fixing them takes a LOT of tokens. In his words: “the cheaper the model that can do this, the better for everybody.”The catch is access. Right now only selected cyber defenders get it, and everyone else gets it “soon”. I got early access the night before the show but barely used it, so I don’t have a hands-on verdict yet.Peter tested it until 1am. On Agent Arena it jumped from Argon’s #7 to #2, at a fraction of Opus 5.5’s cost per task. He also made the best point of the segment: if Google had skipped Argon and shipped Carbon with no waitlist, we’d all be saying “oh my God, Google is back.” Instead, people are confused about why they shipped two models in two weeks.He’s right. But if you missed the Argon drama, Carbon is a great release. Congrats to the team, and please let us actually use it! Until then, you can try it on Arena.Anthropic files to go publicAnthropic’s S-1 - $974M operating profit, listing Monday as ANT (X, Peter’s charts, Peter’s thread)Anthropic filed its S-1 and lists on Nasdaq this Monday under the ticker ANT. This matters because Google, Meta and the others keep their AI numbers buried inside a bigger business. For Anthropic, AI is the whole business, so now we can actually see the numbers. In Q2 2026 they made $974 million in operating profit, with an 85% gross margin.Peter picked the S-1 as his highlight of the week, over any model release. His reason: even if you don’t care how rich Anthropic gets, this proves there is real money in AI, and that money pays for the next models and the infrastructure. The numbers are good, and nobody credible is saying otherwise.Adding 5 billion in a quarter is insaneHere’s the growth. In 2025, Anthropic made a billion or two per quarter. In Q1 2026 they made about $4.7B. In Q2 they made $11.55B, more than double in a single quarter. As Peter said, “that does not happen.”And that was before Opus 5.5 came out. The S-1 stops at Q2, but later reporting puts Q3 around $16.8B, so they added another 5 billion. Peter’s reaction: “Adding 5 billion in a quarter extra is insane.”We say “insane” a lot on this show, but this time it’s literally true. Claude Code started as a side project inside Anthropic. Around Opus 4.6 it turned into a general agent that can actually do things, and this chart is what happened next.A common worry was that the revenue depends on a few huge customers, like Cursor. It doesn’t. In 2023, about 20 customers paid Anthropic more than $100K a year. By December 2025 it was 1,500. Now it’s almost 12,000. Enterprises are slow to adopt, but once they do, it looks like this.Where the compute goesThe S-1 also shows how efficient their compute spending got. Through 2025, Anthropic spent...
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    2 時間 6 分
  • ThursdAI - Oct 22 - AI finds all the vulnerabilities, Claude Duet, DeepSeek drops Infer & more AI news

    ThursdAI - Oct 22 - AI finds all the vulnerabilities, Claude Duet, DeepSeek drops Infer & more AI news
    2026/10/23
    Hey %%first_name%%,Welcome to what cybersecurity experts are calling “Black October” - after a series of critical vulnerabilities that allow remote execution were found in PHP and Node.js, several companies were hacked, and a new supply chain attack on the very popular LiteLLM library was acknowledged.The internet is freaking out, and we’ve tried to make sense of it all, with a security expert Josh Long on the show.Also this week, Anthropic stepped into the personal agent category with Claude Duet, their direct competitor to Dots from OpenAI, Muse from Meta etc’. Duet is proactive and always on, and can do work while you’re asleep! I got access this morning so this isn’t the full review yet.Also DeepSeek is back with a new model and their inference engine!Let’s dive in:ThursdAI - Highest signal weekly AI news show is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Claude Duet - a personal agent powered by Opus 5.5 and doesn’t wait for you (X, Product, Blog)To me this is the most exciting announcement of the week (which otherwise was full of doom and gloom). Anthropic finally stepped into the personal agent category! Shipping Claude Duet, as a separate mobile app, and its own online UI (claude.ai/messages) which is what I was missing from OpenAI’s Dots!Duet is built around Opus 5.5, brings over your existing memory, skills and connected apps, and reaches into 6,000+ connectors and plugins on their platform. Every few hours it checks your accounts, surfaces what needs you, and does the task from its own cloud computer, laptop closed.The rest is pretty much the same, similar UI, similar features to others, just with Claude taste and intelligence. It can somehow interact with Claude Code but not fully, so it can’t be used as a chief of staff. This seems like a weak link given just how much folks are using Claude Code.Claude Duet is also not personal at all, I didn’t find a way to rename it or make it “mine”, it doesn’t seem to do any phone calls. So for now, it’s a great start, but definitely not replacing Muse for me.Hot take: Anthropic is following in this category, not leading. OpenClaw and Hermes worked best with Anthropic models, then Anthropic cut off subscription access for them, and now we finally see why. Every lab has a personal agent now: Dots, Muse (still leading for me), Grok Bot, and Google’s Spark, which most people don’t even know exists. Nisten says Dots “feels like that government employee that tries to avoid all responsibility”, while Muse is “so energetic”. LDJ finds Dots a net positive.My big realization: switching personal agents is WAY harder than switching coding harnesses. Once your assistant knows everything about you, moving takes a lot of effort for the human. If you only copy over the memories/context, then you have two/three AI assistants doing the same work, sending you the same notifications and all updating you about the same emails.Black October: the densest and scariest security week I can rememberSome folks are calling this month Black October, and it’s one of the worst I can remember. Some bugs were found by AI, some attacks are run by AI (Microsoft says a China state-aligned group used an agentic pentest framework called ARTEX against hundreds of organizations), and some attackers are just going after your AI keys. Security expert Josh Long joined to keep us sane, with an attempt of positivity though it wasn’t easy!PHP2Shell - AI helped find holes in the language that runs 70% of websites (Wiz, OpenAI, Blog, Calif, CISA, Checker)This was one of the hugest things that shook the industry this week!PHP runs an estimated 70% of websites, and two bugs in the language engine itself let an attacker send one request, no login, and potentially take over the server with code execution ability. CVSS 9.2, every release back to 5.4. It is really important that if you are running anything on a PHP server, that you patch it right away. Ask your agents to do a security audit.This vulnerability was present in the PHP code for 14 years! Calif found the first bug in an audit funded through OpenAI’s Patch the Planet initiative. Josh says several groups finding the same bugs independently is rare, his advice was refreshingly calm: if you run a PHP server, you should have patched yesterday, no excuses. Cloudflare invented a new form of WAF to block it for all websites that are protected by Cloudflare and the big cloud companies patched right away, so regular folks browsing the web can go about their daily business.Still, a lot of websites that are run on PHP and aren’t able to patch, their IT guy quit, or they lost the keys to their servers, and your information can be at risk of getting stolen. Personal security actions like locking down your credit (if you’re in US), rotating passwords, having a password manager is always a good idea.OpenAI Daybreak - the defenders got...
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    1 時間 56 分
  • Claude now leads 26% of Anthropic’s R&D, Meta drops an 816B open model & Gemini 4 Argon

    Claude now leads 26% of Anthropic’s R&D, Meta drops an 816B open model & Gemini 4 Argon
    2026/10/16
    Hey, it’s Alex 👋What a freaking week! I spent 3 days at AI Engineer in New York, and we did the show from a real studio in Manhattan (the internet did NOT cooperate at first, but we got there 😅). And while I was running around the Sheraton, the labs kept shipping.Meta became a frontier lab, for real this time. Muse Wonder is #2 on Arena, and then, in the last minutes of the show, Meta ALSO dropped Muse Spark Open, an 816B open weights model. Google’s big Gemini is finally back with Gemini 4 Argon, and Omar Sanseviero and Geneviève Huskens from Google DeepMind came on to show it off. Anthropic gave us 4 stories plus a rumor, and Nathan Benaich came by to talk State of AI 2026.My theme this week: AI engineers are sleeping on personal agents. More on that below, including how my Muse found this studio and got me coffee on the way here.With me: Wolfram Ravenwolf, Peter Gostev (Arena), Nisten, Yam Peleg and LDJ (who brought the breaking news, as always). Let’s dive in (all links at the end as always!)Meta is BACK at the frontierMuse Wonder - Meta’s first frontier model is #2 on Arena, and it smells BIG (X, X, Arena, Blog)Folks, we told you after Llama 4 was a disaster, we told you when Zuck started hiring people with soup: do not, under any circumstances, bet against Zuck (and now Alex Wang). Muse Wonder is #2 on Arena Text at 1513, 12 points behind Argon, and it definitely smells like a big model.There are 2 of them. Muse Wonder is in the API at $4 in / $20 out per million tokens, basically Opus 5.5 pricing. Muse Wonder Full, the better one, is only for Muse Code subscribers at $50 or $200 a month. Did you see what they did there? Everybody calls their top setting “Max”, Meta called it Full, so it’s... Wonder Full. Wonderful 😂 No open weights for either, Meta says they’re too big and maybe too risky.Meta’s own table beats Opus, Astra and Fable on a bunch of evals... but Personal Superintelligence Index, GDP.pdf, JobBench, MemoryBench (which Meta built, and then won)? I’ve never seen most of these. Every launch now is the iPhone 18 moment: numbers bigger, best one yet.On evals we know, Artificial Analysis has Wonder Full at 56 and Wonder at 52, Opus 5.5 on top at 58. And on OSWorld, the Wonder we can use sits below Fable and Opus, and computer use is the number one thing I need from an assistant.Peter’s Arena view: #2 on text means people like talking to it, but it’s 12th on Agent Arena, and he tried building websites with it, “it was kind of awful.” His theory: Theo loved Wonder Full and thought the API Wonder was bad, so maybe Meta is talking about a different model than the one we got. Not ideal. He also found the half-life of a benchmark quoted in a launch is about ONE release: quote it once because the number looks good, never see it again.Wolfram says it’s excellent in German. Nisten joined not knowing what Muse Wonder was (”No idea”), sometimes our co-hosts come to get their news from the show.My Muse got upgraded with a clickHere’s where I disagree with the timeline. “It can’t do 3D scenes, so it sucks” misses the point. Meta is tuning Wonder for Muse, the personal agent. Officially, Wonder will “soon” power more of Muse, subscribers first. I’m on the paid plan, and my Muse (Wilfred) flipped to Wonder the moment I subscribed. Matrix moment: “I know kung fu.”Then I kept shoving tasks at it. Muse found the podcast studio I recorded from in NY and emailed Ezra at Virgo Studios with my requirements, got me coffee on the way here, and designed and ordered the wristbands for our AIE sauna meetup. The failures weren’t logic, they were the real world: a site that’s blank because Cloudflare doesn’t like agents, a Stripe link that wouldn’t connect, and businesses that hung up because they didn’t want to talk to a personal assistant 😂 Peter’s read: that’s the harness, not the model, and it’s exactly why this stuff is so hard to benchmark.Muse Spark Open - Llama is SO back (X, X, Blog, HF)In the last minutes of the show, LDJ hit us with breaking news: Meta released Muse Spark Open 20 minutes earlier. 816B total, 42B active, 1M context, multimodal in, text out. Meta calls it the most capable US open-weight model to date. I wish I had my air horn button!LDJ’s framing: about 3x smaller than Kimi K3, and the fair comparison is GLM 5.3 (753B, 40B active). You’ll need about 700GB of VRAM for NVFP4, or, per Zuck, two new M5 Ultra Mac Studios.Peter found the coding asterisk: Terminal-Bench 2.1 is 76.4 vs 83.9 for GLM 5.3 and 85 for Kimi K3. Better than the US open models, not yet at the top Chinese ones. Nisten read the license live: show “built with Muse Spark Open” in your product, and there’s a $20M annual revenue cap. His take: great for generating data, and “probably one of the best computer use ones.”Post-show breaking: Peter put Spark Open next to the earlier Spark releases, and on coding it lands closer to Spark 1.1/...
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    1 時間 58 分
  • Chen Goldberg (CoreWeave) on the AI loop, Forge and infrastructure for agents

    Chen Goldberg (CoreWeave) on the AI loop, Forge and infrastructure for agents
    2026/10/12

    Hey folks, a quick bonus episode!

    At CoreWeave's Fully Connected in San Francisco, a few minutes after she walked off the keynote stage, I sat down with Chen Goldberg, EVP of Product & Engineering at CoreWeave.

    We talked about Forge, the loop every AI engineer is running now (run, observe, curate, improve, evaluate), what carries over from the Kubernetes days to agents, and what breaks first when agents hit your infrastructure.

    Video below, and the audio is right here in your podcast feed. Enjoy!



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe
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    26 分
  • ThursdAI - Oct 8 - OpenAI drops 722 math papers, Haiku 5.5 hits 10 cents & more

    ThursdAI - Oct 8 - OpenAI drops 722 math papers, Haiku 5.5 hits 10 cents & more
    2026/10/09
    Hey %%first_name%%, another banger AI week, let me catch you up!We say this often but this week we all felt the acceleration! Just look at one Tuesday. OpenAI dropped 722 math manuscripts. Meta( With Stripe, Shopify and Walmart) announced a new agent protocol. OpenAI opened up the Decisions API. Mistral came back with Le Chonk (Mistral 4), Claude moved into Google Docs, and we at CoreWeave shipped RL Rollouts. That was ONE day. Then the rest of the week happened 😂 Haiku 5.5, D1, and tons more!I had 48 topics on my list, so I asked Claude to build me a Tinder for AI news: I swipe on each story, and it stack-ranks what makes the show this week. I hope we did good (lmk in comments if we missed a major news story)With me: LDJ, Peter, Yam, Nisten and friend of the pod Maxime Labonne from Liquid AI joined us to talk decision models. Let’s dive in, all links at the end as always!OpenAI solves Math!?OpenAI drops 722 math manuscripts from a model nobody can use (X, GitHub, Blog, Fable’s tally)Remember when ONE Navier-Stokes result was the whole show? On Tuesday night, OpenAI quietly pushed 722 math manuscripts to GitHub, grouped into 372 families of results. No hype video, no exploding-head emojis, just a very thin blog post. My favorite new term for this is a “slop grenade”: somebody throws a mountain of output at you, and now you have to shovel through it.An internal model nobody outside OpenAI can use was pointed at about 4,000 open problems, at about 3 hours of ChatGPT Pro-level thinking per result. Will Depue asked Fable to measure the drop in Navier-Stokes units. The answer: roughly 5. Roughly 5 “Navier Stokes” size solutions dropped all at once!The math is so advanced that a mathematician in one family of results often can’t follow the family next door without an LLM explaining it. I find that fascinating and scary at the same time.Peter’s tried this before! For weeks he threw GPT-6, Fable and Opus at one problem, Hadwiger-Nelson. He thinks he burned 300 to 400 BILLION tokens, and in his words, “I did not discover a single bloody thing.” And this new OpenAI’s model spent about 3 hours on it and narrowed the bounds from 5-to-7 down to 6-or-7 😅Then LDJ dropped a stat that I made him repeat slowly. Fable and Astra had put together a list of the 500 most important open problems in math ever. On Tuesday, OpenAI dropped solutions to 92 of them. There’s also a list of the 100 most significant problems from the last 12 months, and over 80% of those got solutions in this drop. Absolutely insane, folks. Yam’s reaction was a very loud “F***ing go.”Yam’s favorite is the Riemann one. It doesn’t prove the hypothesis, it bounds a region for the zeros, which “was never done before, and many, many, many people have tried.” And to the “it’s just brute force” crowd, Yam says: “Let’s brute force everything.” Yes please, room temperature superconductors next! LDJ’s mathematician friends think that on some of these, the model used fewer tokens and less time than a human would. So who’s brute forcing whom? 🤔The missing crypto results (speculation!)If you hold any crypto, this part is for you.The manuscripts are numbered, and some numbers are missing. There’s a #44 and a #46, but no #45, and LDJ counted 4 or 5 gaps like that. He also looked at which topics made it in, and cryptography is almost absent.So here’s the theory going around. Maybe OpenAI found something big in cryptography and held it back, either by its own choice or because someone asked them to. LDJ said it himself: it sounds conspiratorial. But the US government really can stop cryptography research from being published on national security grounds.To be clear, this is SPECULATION. Nobody outside OpenAI knows what’s in #45. But Bitcoin’s security rests on elliptic curve math. Imagine a paper that shows a way into the 25,000 old Satoshi wallets, each holding 50 BTC. Not great for the price, not great for the world, and not great for encryption in general.“Are you saying your field is useless?”Not everyone is celebrating. Not every result is verified in Lean, and nobody outside OpenAI can reproduce any of it.Kevin Buzzard (thanks Ksenia from Turing Post) says many mathematicians are going through the stages of grief. I get it. Imagine spending decades on one problem and watching 3 hours of compute knock it down. When I wrote code in the 2000s, I didn’t consider it my life’s work. For a lot of mathematicians, that one problem IS their life’s work.Then came a letter from the Association for Human Mathematics: “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” Peter’s take: imagine doctors saying “please stop curing diseases, we’ve got a good thing going.” So, “are you saying that your field is useless?” You can’t say your field is really useful and also ask everyone not to solve any of it.I don’t understand the please-don’t-solve crowd. Get on board. This is in ...
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    2 時間 3 分
  • ThursdAI - Oct 1 - OpenAI joins the assistant race, CoreWeave drops serverless GPUs & more

    ThursdAI - Oct 1 - OpenAI joins the assistant race, CoreWeave drops serverless GPUs & more
    2026/10/02
    Hey %%first_name%%, it’s Alex 👋 What a freaking week!This one was special. We came to you LIVE from the middle of the show floor at Moscone, from CoreWeave’s Fully Connected, with robots walking behind us and a Vera Rubin rack a few feet away. ThursdAI is only possible because of CoreWeave, and this is their biggest event of the year, so we packed up the mics and did the show right there (at 11am, which confused a bunch of you, sorry!).It’s October. The last quarter of 2026. And nobody’s pacing! There’s no pacing the frontier. Three big models this week (GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Gemini 4 Argon), OpenAI’s biggest DevDay ever, and the story I’ve been yelling about for weeks finally went mainstream: OpenAI joined the AI assistant race.With me: Wolfram Ravenwolf in person on the floor, Peter Gostev from Arena (who was at DevDay with me), Nisten and LDJ remote. In hour two we interviewed four folks from CoreWeave, on physical AI, Forge, sandboxes, and one piece of breaking news I’m still excited about. Let’s dive in (all links at the end as always!)OpenAI DevDay 2026 - 20 launches and a new assistantDots - OpenAI joins the AI assistant race (X, Blog)Meta has Muse. Grok has Grokbot. Anthropic has Claude, but it’s not really an assistant. And this week OpenAI stepped in with something called Dots. I was in the room at Fort Mason when Sam talked about it, and it was the headline of their fourth DevDay, which honestly felt like OpenAI’s WWDC: 20 releases, the biggest DevDay ever.Funny thing, the original ChatGPT system prompt was literally “you are an AI assistant.” But it wasn’t proactive, it never pinged you, it just sat there. So OpenAI looked at their competitors, looked at Peter Steinberger from OpenClaw (who they hired like 8 months ago), and built this. A dot is an always-on agent in ChatGPT, powered by GPT-6 Astra, with its own computer and its own browser in the cloud, connected to 4,000+ apps people already built for ChatGPT. It works 24/7, you can talk to it in Slack or Teams, and there’s an interface that looks like a phone call. I think that’s going to be great for my mom.Sam literally said he uses dots to run OpenAI. And my favorite DevDay moment: Romain Huet’s live voice demo didn’t work, because somebody was deploying in the middle. But Thibault’s dot had already pinged him that the demo might break. The dot knew before the humans did 😂Wolfram (him and Amy are a known duo) loved that Sam uses it for actual work. Peter was more honest: underwhelmed at onboarding (”you connect and it’s like... then what?”), but once you’re past that you’re talking to Astra, and it’s great at juggling threads through one bot. Same shape as Muse. Wolfram’s version: one executive assistant, and a lot of sub-agent employees working for you.Dots is Pro only for now (including the $100 plan), while Meta gives Muse away free. With 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users, this goes to everyone eventually. This is the race now.GPT-6.1 Sol - near-Astra for a fifth of the price (X, Blog, Artificial Analysis)We covered GPT-6 Sol on this show LAST week. Five days later it’s already replaced. GPT-6.1 Sol is the same price, $2 in and $10 out, but cached input is now 95% off, 10 cents a million tokens. OpenAI’s pitch is near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price.And the independent numbers kind of back that up. Artificial Analysis has it 1 point below Astra at 72 cents a task vs over 3 dollars. On Deep SWE it actually beats Astra at about a sixth of the cost. It’s the default in Codex now, and folks are calling it the workhorse.LDJ said it has “less of the big model smell” but loves the token efficiency, Sonnet and Opus 5.5 burn a LOT of tokens. Peter has it 4th on Code Arena, above Fable, and says it’s a bit “artistic,” it goes into its hole and comes back with the thing. And his verdict is the one I had to repeat straight to the camera:It does not make sense to use Fable or Astra as your daily driver right now. Opus 5.5 is enough. GPT-6.1 Sol is enough. For Navier-Stokes level problems, sure, reach for the big ones. Maybe THIS is what pacing the frontier looks like 🤔One thing nobody mentioned on stage: the WSJ reports OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra, the big one, after safety tests showed it being more deceptive. OpenAI hasn’t confirmed it. But the model they felt good shipping this week is the cheap one.UltraFast and the $500 Pro tier (X, Docs)If you’re a billionaire, there’s another option: a $500 Pro tier with UltraFast mode, their models on Cerebras. Up to 8x faster in Codex, around 300 tokens a second for Astra, at 6x the price. Sam said it’s so fast he never wants to go back.And quietly, the $200 Pro plan is back... with half the usage. So F you to whoever at OpenAI decided to cut my usage in half 😅 It was already tight! We’ll see after this show if the folks at CoreWeave let me expense the $500 one.Codex moves to the cloud (...
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    1 時間 57 分
  • Opus 5.5 is your new workhorse! OpenAI ships GPT 6 Sol and Luna before DevDay and Meta goes all in on Muse! Your friday read is here

    Opus 5.5 is your new workhorse! OpenAI ships GPT 6 Sol and Luna before DevDay and Meta goes all in on Muse! Your friday read is here
    2026/09/25
    Hey, it’s Alex 👋What a freaking week! A week after every lab head agreed to “pace the frontier”, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped big new models within hours of each other, and both of them are CHEAPER. So much for pacing 😂Visit https://thursdai.news/ep/2026-09-24 for all the links in this podcastAnd we had a new producer on the show today! Opus 5.5 listened to us live, put up the chyrons, kept me on time (mostly) and even fact-checked Nisten on air. If the stream died, you knew who to blame. You can re-watch it work on thursdai.live if you want to experience being there with us!3 huge themes this week: pacing the frontier does not mean stopping, Assistants not just agents (Meta went all in on Muse at Connect), and voice, where Google now says it has the best TTS in the world... and it clones voices.With me: Peter Gostev (Arena), Nisten, Yam Peleg, and Wolfram Ravenwolf live from AI Engineer Paris (thanks Mazi for the tether!), plus JevBench creator Florian S. Let’s dive in (all links at the end as always!)Frontier AI - not pacing yet!Claude Opus 5.5 - Opus is BACK, Fable-level smarts for 40% less (X, Blog, System card)Folks. FOLKS. Opus 5.5 is the highlight of my week, and it’s not even close. It’s like Opus 4.6 is back, with Fable-level abilities, and it talks like a normal person again - no more Jargon Douche Claude!My week started with burning through my quotas on Fable, and I was like, oh no, I need Claude for production on Thursday! Then Opus 5.5 dropped and... I just couldn’t get to the end of my quota. I ran workflows, agents, Claude Code for hours with no end in sight. Remember the “limitless Codex” days when you never thought about quotas? Then Astra came out and I burned my entire weekly quota in half a day (ps. this was partly due to a bad config, so if Astra is burning your tokens, keep reading for a fix). Now it’s flipped, and Claude is the seemingly limitless one. And it’s fast!The numbers back it up. It beats Anthropic’s own Fable 5.1 on GDPval-AA (1846 vs 1735), 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 vs 57.9% for GPT-6 Astra, and it’s 40% cheaper than Opus 5. Output goes from $25 to $20 /1Mtok and cached reads from 50 cents to 20 cents, and for agentic coding the cache reads are most of your bill, so you really feel it. Basically the smaller, overachieving brother of Fable. Sonnet and Haiku 5.5 are coming in the next few weeks too.Peter came in hot with Arena news: Opus 5.5 is #1 on Code Arena, above Astra, and the HTML and 3D stuff it generates is “completely insane.” His one caveat: on his hardest max-effort prompts, a single generation cost $60 to $80 in API terms, so the long tail can still get pricey.And then Nisten, who (like all of us) has specific opinions about Anthropic’s politics, said it writes the best code he’s seen, it’s crazy good at WebGPU and kernels, and it’s “an absolute banger.” It’s his default now. Folks, do you understand what it takes for Nisten’s default to NOT be some obscure open source model he runs himself on 17 GPUs?! Anthropic won over Nisten. I don’t think you guys get what just happened here.Wolfram is the holdout, he left Anthropic over the OpenClaw bans and hasn’t touched it since. Wolfram, how do I say this gently... you’re an evaluator, this is not allowed 😂An Anthropic employee basically said “sorry for Opus 5, we hope this makes up for it”, and honestly it does. Opus 5 was slow, incoherent and full of Claude-isms. Nobody wanted to talk to it. The Claude-isms are gone, the jargon is gone, this model talks like a human. I used to love Opus back in the Opus 3 days, and it feels like that again.Want to squeeze even more out of it? Read the great Addy Osmani’s guide to Opus 5.5 (@addyosmani). 2 things blew my mind: stop writing “think carefully” in your prompts (”You don’t need to ask it to think”, it picks its own depth, and replies start sooner without it), and one early tester found Opus 5.5 on its LOWEST effort caught more bugs than Opus 5 on high, with fewer false alarms. Try low effort before you go max!Tip from me to you: if it ever gives you something confusing, the pstack “bro” skill (/bro) makes it say it again in human words. I use it all the time.(Full disclosure: Opus 5.5 produced the show AND helped with this writeup, so it might be a tiny bit biased 😅 but the quota thing is 100% me.) Anthropic, please, please don’t nerf this one.GPT-6 Sol and Luna - half the price, and honestly better than Astra for me (X, Blog, Caching)Hours later, OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Sol ($2 in / $10 out) and Luna (10 cents in / 50 cents out, that’s basically free!), at half the GPT-5.6 price. The lineup is now Astra, Sol and Luna (bye Terra). On DeepSWE, Sol gets 68.8 and Luna 66.6. The sneaky big one for builders: 90% off cached input, and changing reasoning effort or tools no longer busts your cache 👏Ok, hot take... Astra has been kind of dumb for me day to day, burning tokens for ...
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