The cycle of language model releases is, one at least hopes, now complete.

OpenAI gave us GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max.

xAI gave us Grok 4.1.

Google DeepMind gave us Gemini 3 Pro and Nana Banana Pro.

Anthropic gave us Claude Opus 4.5. It is the best model, sir. Use it whenever you can.

One way Opus 4.5 is unique is that it as what it refers to as a ‘soul document.’ Where OpenAI tries to get GPT-5.1 to adhere to its model spec that lays out specific behaviors, Anthropic instead explains to Claude Opus 4.5 how to be virtuous and the reasoning behind its rules, and lets a good model and good governance flow from there. The results are excellent, and we all look forward to learning more. See both the Opus 4.5 post and today's update for more details.

Finally, DeepSeek gave us v3.2. It has very good benchmarks and is remarkably cheap, but it is slow and I can’t find people excited to use it in practice. I’ll offer a relatively short report on it tomorrow, I am giving one last day for more reactions.

The latest attempt to slip unilateral [...]

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Outline:

(01:47) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(02:51) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(04:14) On Your Marks

(05:21) Get My Agent On The Line

(06:02) Advertising Is Coming

(07:30) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(13:43) Fun With Media Generation

(15:11) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(16:33) You Drive Me Crazy

(16:50) Unprompted Attention

(17:05) They Took Our Jobs

(22:49) Get Involved

(24:02) Introducing

(24:27) Variously Effective Altruism

(28:27) In Other AI News

(30:38) Show Me the Money

(30:45) Quiet Speculations

(32:06) Seb Krier On Agents Versus Multiagents

(38:24) Olivia Moore Makes 2026 Predictions

(41:17) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(42:30) Americans Really Do Not Like AI

(47:46) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(49:57) My Offer Is Nothing

(55:28) America Pauses

(57:05) David Sacks Covered In New York Times

(01:00:12) The Week in Audio

(01:00:43) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:01:41) To The Moon

(01:08:54) Showing Up

(01:13:22) DeepMind Pivots Its Interpretability Research

(01:16:12) The Explicit Goal Of OpenAI Is Recursive Self-Improvement

(01:21:20) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:28:03) Misaligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence Is Difficult To Hire For

(01:29:12) You've Got Soul

(01:40:04) Disagreements About Timelines

(01:44:53) Other Disagreements About Timelines

(01:50:18) Messages From Janusworld

(01:50:33) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:50:58) The Lighter Side

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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