Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go.

As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped.

If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases.

Normally I keep everything to numbered lists, but in several cases here it was more of a ‘he didn’t just say what I think he did did he’ and I needed extensive quotes.

In addition to the podcast, there were some discussions around safety, or the lack thereof, at xAI, and Elon Musk went on what one can only describe as megatilt, including going hard after Anthropic's Amanda Askell. I will include that as a postscript.

I will not include recent developments regarding Twitter, since that didn’t come up in the interview.

I lead with a discussion of bounded distrust and how to epistemically consider Elon Musk, since that will be important throughout including in the postscript.

What are the key takeaways?

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Outline:

(02:56) Bounded Distrust

(05:12) IN SPACE

(09:56) The AI Will Follow You To Mars

(22:32) xAI Business Plans

(25:54) Optimus Prime

(27:04) Beating China

(30:02) SpaceX and How To Run a Company Elon Style

(33:17) DOGE

(35:29) TeraFab IN SPACE

(35:47) Postscript: Safety Third at xAI

(40:15) Elon Serves Back Saying That Which Is Not

(42:51) Elons Army

(43:55) Children Are Our Future

(48:11) Where Do We Go From Here

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Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was very clearly one of those. So here we go.

As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped.

If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases.

What are the main takeaways?

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Outline:

(01:47) The Pace of Progress

(08:56) Continual Learning

(13:46) Does Not Compute

(15:29) Step Two

(22:58) The Quest For Sane Regulations

(26:08) Beating China

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OpenAI is back with a new Codex model, released the same day as Claude Opus 4.6.

The headline pitch is it combines the coding skills of GPT-5.2-Codex with the general knowledge and skills of other models, along with extra speed and improvements in the Codex harness, so that it can now handle your full stack agentic needs.

We also got the Codex app for Mac, which is getting positive reactions, and quickly picked up a million downloads.

CPT-5.3-Codex is only available inside Codex. It is not in the API.

As usual, Anthropic's release was understated, basically a ‘here's Opus 4.6, a 212-page system card and a lot of benchmarks, it's a good model, sir, so have fun.’ Whereas OpenAI gave us a lot less words and a lot less benchmarks, while claiming their model was definitely the best.

OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex is the most capable agentic coding model to date, combining the frontier coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2. This enables it to take on long-running tasks that involve research, tool use, and complex execution.

Much like a colleague, you can steer and interact with GPT-5.3-Codex while [...]

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Outline:

(01:50) The Overall Picture

(03:00) Quickly, Theres No Time

(04:15) System Card

(04:49) AI Box Experiment

(05:22) Maybe Cool It With Rm

(07:02) Preparedness Framework

(11:14) Glass Houses

(12:16) OpenAI Appears To Have Violated SB 53 In a Meaningful Way

(14:29) Safeguards They Did Implement

(16:55) Misalignment Risks and Internal Deployment

(18:38) The Official Pitch

(24:28) Inception

(26:12) Turn The Beat Around

(27:35) Codex Does Cool Things

(29:33) Positive Reactions

(38:03) Negative Reactions

(40:43) Codex of Ultimate Vibing

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Life comes at you increasingly fast. Two months after Claude Opus 4.5 we get a substantial upgrade in Claude Opus 4.6. The same day, we got GPT-5.3-Codex.

That used to be something we’d call remarkably fast. It's probably the new normal, until things get even faster than that. Welcome to recursive self-improvement.

Before those releases, I was using Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code for essentially everything interesting, and only using GPT-5.2 and Gemini to fill in the gaps or for narrow specific uses.

GPT-5.3-Codex is restricted to Codex, so this means that for other purposes Anthropic and Claude have only extended the lead. This is the first time in a while that a model got upgraded while it was still my clear daily driver.

Claude also pulled out several other advances to their ecosystem, including fast mode, and expanding Cowork to Windows, while OpenAI gave us an app for Codex.

For fully agentic coding, GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 both look like substantial upgrades. Both sides claim they’re better, as you would expect. If you’re serious about your coding and have hard problems, you should try out both, and see what combination works [...]

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Outline:

(01:55) On Your Marks

(17:35) Official Pitches

(17:56) It Compiles

(21:42) It Exploits

(22:45) It Lets You Catch Them All

(23:16) It Does Not Get Eaten By A Grue

(24:10) It Is Overeager

(25:24) It Builds Things

(27:58) Pro Mode

(28:24) Reactions

(28:36) Positive Reactions

(42:12) Negative Reactions

(50:40) Personality Changes

(56:28) On Writing

(59:11) They Banned Prefilling

(01:00:27) A Note On System Cards In General

(01:01:34) Listen All Yall Its Sabotage

(01:05:00) The Codex of Competition

(01:06:22) The Niche of Gemini

(01:07:55) Choose Your Fighter

(01:12:17) Accelerando

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Coverage of Claude Opus 4.6 started yesterday with the mundane alignment and model welfare sections of the model card.

Today covers the kinds of safety I think matter most: Sabotage, deception, situational awareness, outside red teaming and most importantly the frontier, catastrophic and existential risks. I think it was correct to release Opus 4.6 as an ASL-3 model, but the process Anthropic uses is breaking down, and it not on track to reliably get the right answer on Opus 5.

Tomorrow I’ll cover benchmarks, reactions and the holistic takeaways and practical implications. I’m still taking it all in, but it seems clear to me that Claude Opus 4.6 is the best model out there and should be your daily driver, with or without Claude Code, on most non-coding tasks, but it is not without its weaknesses, in particular in writing and falling into generating more ‘AI slop’ style prose than Claude Opus 4.5.

For coding tasks, I presume that Opus 4.6 with Claude Code is the play, especially with Agent Teams and fast mode available, and I’m using it myself, but Codex with GPT-5.3-Codex-Max is also a strong model and a viable alternative, and a fully [...]

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Outline:

(01:32) Sabotage, Deception and Evaluation Integrity

(03:42) Sandbagging On Dangerous Capability Evaluations

(06:01) Situational Awareness

(07:33) Inhibiting Evaluation Awareness (6.5)

(09:06) Self-Preference

(10:24) UK AISI Testing

(11:40) Apollo Research Testing

(14:24) Responsible Scaling Policy Evaluations

(15:45) CBRN (mostly Biology)

(18:43) Autonomy

(26:40) Autonomy Benchmarks

(29:53) Cyber

(31:27) Ship It Anyway

(33:40) You Are Not Ready

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Claude Opus 4.6 is here. It was built with and mostly evaluated by Claude.

Their headline pitch includes:

Other notes:

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Outline:

(03:45) A Three Act Play

(04:57) Safety Not Guaranteed

(10:53) Pliny Can Still Jailbreak Everything

(12:48) Transparency Is Good: The 212-Page System Card

(13:53) Mostly Harmless

(17:45) Mostly Honest

(19:01) Agentic Safety

(20:27) Prompt Injection

(23:07) Key Alignment Findings

(33:48) Behavioral Evidence (6.2)

(38:40) Reward Hacking and 'Overly Agentic Actions'

(40:37) Metrics (6.2.5.2)

(42:40) All I Did It All For The GUI

(43:58) Case Studies and Targeted Evaluations Of Behaviors (6.3)

(44:19) Misrepresenting Tool Results

(45:09) Unexpected Language Switching

(46:12) The Ghost of Jones Foods

(47:54) Loss of Style Points

(48:54) White Box Model Diffing

(49:13) Model Welfare

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Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code.

OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Codex, and this week gave us an app form of Codex that already has a million active users.

That's all very exciting, and next week is going to be about covering that.

This post is about all the cool things that happened before that, which we will be building upon now that capabilities have further advanced. This if from Before Times.

Almost all of it still applies. I haven’t had much chance yet to work with Opus 4.6, but as far as I can tell you should mostly keep on doing what you were doing before that switch, only everything will work better. Maybe get a bit more ambitious. Agent swarms might be more of a technique shifter, but we need to give that some time.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:02) Claude Code and Cowork Offer Mundane Utility

(04:07) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False

(07:26) Inflection Point

(11:07) Welcome To The Takeoff

(11:29) Huh, Upgrades

(16:02) Todos Become Tasks

(17:46) I'm Putting Together A Team

(20:06) Compact Problems

(20:53) Code Yourself A Date

(24:20) Verification and Generation Are Distinct Skills

(26:07) Skilling Up

(34:12) AskUserQuestion

(34:42) For Advanced Players

(36:53) So They Quit Reading

(37:24) Reciprocity Is The Key To Every Relationship

(41:37) The Implementation Gap

(45:04) The Lighter Side

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Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code.

OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Codex, and this week gave us an app form of Codex that already has a million active users.

That's all very exciting, and next week is going to be about covering that.

This post is about all the cool things that happened before that, which we will be building upon now that capabilities have further advanced. This if from Before Times.

Almost all of it still applies. I haven’t had much chance yet to work with Opus 4.6, but as far as I can tell you should mostly keep on doing what you were doing before that switch, only everything will work better. Maybe get a bit more ambitious. Agent swarms might be more of a technique shifter, but we need to give that some time.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:04) Claude Code and Cowork Offer Mundane Utility

(04:21) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False

(07:51) Inflection Point

(11:40) Welcome To The Takeoff

(12:04) Huh, Upgrades

(16:51) Todos Become Tasks

(18:36) I'm Putting Together A Team

(21:00) Compact Problems

(21:49) Code Yourself A Date

(25:20) Verification and Generation Are Distinct Skills

(27:11) Skilling Up

(36:44) AskUserQuestion

(37:14) For Advanced Players

(39:33) So They Quit Reading

(40:07) Reciprocity Is The Key To Every Relationship

(44:19) The Implementation Gap

(47:57) The Lighter Side

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Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook?

One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week.

That's the internet having an absurdly short attention span, rather than those events not being important. They were definitely important.

They were also early. It is not quite time for AI social networks or fully unleashed autonomous AI agents. The security issues have not been sorted out, and reliability and efficiency aren’t quite there.

There's two types of reactions to that. The wrong one is ‘oh it is all hype.’

The right one is ‘we’ll get back to this in a few months.’

Other highlights of the week include reactions to Dario Amodei's essay The Adolescence of Technology. The essay was trying to do many things for many people. In some ways it did a good job. In other ways, especially when discussing existential risks and those more concerned than Dario, it let us down.

Everyone excited for the Super Bowl?

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:13) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:45) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(04:20) Huh, Upgrades

(06:13) They Got Served, They Served Back, Now It's On

(15:15) On Your Marks

(18:42) Get My Agent On The Line

(19:57) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(23:14) Copyright Confrontation

(23:47) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(24:24) Unprompted Attention

(24:36) Get Involved

(28:12) Introducing

(28:40) State of AI Report 2026

(36:18) In Other AI News

(40:45) Autonomous Killer Robots

(42:11) Show Me the Money

(44:46) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(47:58) Quiet Speculations

(48:54) Seb Krier Says Seb Krier Things

(58:07) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(58:24) Chip City

(01:02:39) The Week in Audio

(01:03:00) The Adolescence of Technology

(01:03:49) I Won't Stand To Be Disparaged

(01:08:31) Constitutional Conversation

(01:10:04) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:13:51) Don't Panic

(01:16:23) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:17:41) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:18:48) The Lighter Side

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I had to delay this a little bit, but the results are in and Kimi K2.5 is pretty good.

Table of Contents

Official Introduction

Introducing Kimi K2.5,

Kimi.ai: Meet Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual Agentic Intelligence.

Global SOTA on Agentic Benchmarks: HLE full set (50.2%), BrowseComp (74.9%)

Code with Taste: turn chats, images & videos into aesthetic websites with expressive motion.

Agent Swarm (Beta): self-directed agents working in parallel, at scale. Up to 100 sub-agents, 1,500 tool calls, 4.5× faster compared with single-agent setup.

K2.5 is now live on

http://kimi.com

in chat mode and agent mode.

Wu Haoning (Kimi): We [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) Official Introduction

(03:16) On Your Marks

(06:10) Positive Reactions

(08:33) Skeptical Reactions

(11:05) Kimi Product Accounts

(11:39) Agent Swarm

(13:06) Who Are You?

(15:48) Export Controls Are Working

(16:24) Where Are You Going?

(19:47) Safety Not Even Third

(20:55) It's A Good Model, Sir

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