It Doesn't Matter How Smart You Are
This Week in AI: GPT 5.6 Sol | Elon + Zuck | Samsung
Good afternoon,
What a week it has been for AI:
OpenAI finally got its Mythos-looking model when it shipped GPT-5.6,
Elon and Zuck both dropped models that make frontier intelligence way cheaper (with Zuck’s first tweet in 3 years btw)
Samsung became the most profitable company on planet Earth
The guys who wrote the most famous AI doom forecast ever just published a sequel essay and… it has a happy ending.
Let’s get into the news.
-Ejaaz
OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 is here
OpenAI released GPT-5.6 yesterday in 3 tiers: Sol (flagship), Terra (mid), and Luna (cheap) after two weeks stuck in a Washington-supervised chokehold where the government approved access customer by customer.
But how good is this model?
Well on Agents’ Last Exam, a test of long-running professional work across 55 fields, Sol beats Claude Fable 5 by 13.1 points at roughly 25% the cost. It’s also VERY fast, setting new records on browsing, computer use, and terminal work… plus a new “ultra” mode lets it spin up sub-agents to attack complex jobs.
IMO its still not as good as Fable 5 but definitely cheaper and an absolute workhorse. Fable sort of sounds like a wise old man whereas GPT 5.6 will just keep throwing itself at the problem until it’s done.
Sam Altman said it himself: its not the “smartest ever,” but Sol is 54% more token efficient on coding.
Go out there an give it a go and let me know what you think. We’re going to record our own review next week too!
Elon & Zuck Dropped 2 Impressive Models
You know the phrase “your margin is my opportunity”?
That’s basically what the new models from SpaceXAI and Meta are: 80% the power of Fable but so SO much cheaper.
Grok 4.5 landed at $2 in / $6 out per million tokens. Opus 4.8 charges $5 / $25. Elon’s pitch was “Opus-class, but faster and cheaper.” It’s worth noting this thing has been designed to make apps and products, so if you’re a builder on a budget, this is the model to try out this weekend.
Mark Zuckerberg broke a 3-year silence on X to launch Muse Spark 1.1, the first model Meta has EVER charged for at $1.25 / $4.25. It actually beats the frontier on several agentic benchmarks (tool use, professional tasks), but loses on hardcore coding (not surprising).
Don’t dismiss these models.
There’s an important trend where enterprises have stopped using the smartest model and now optimize for cost per unit of intelligence… aka what’s the least I can pay to get this specific task done?
It doesn’t matter how smart your model is anymore.
AI Video is Blowing Our Minds
ByteDance shipped Seedream 5.0 Pro, an image model that thinks before it draws by reasoning through your prompt, searching the web in real time for factual grounding, and edits with crazy precision.
Intuitively it feels much more like a creators tool than something thats going to replace creators which honestly’s a refreshing change.
Meta beat them 2 days earlier though by shipping Muse Image, its first in-house image model that landed the #2 spot on the Arena leaderboard behind only OpenAI. Very impressive for Meta, who I honestly counted out of the race a while ago.
It’s agentic too, which means it writes code to generate accurate charts and images of QR codes, self-refining before showing you anything.
I think I need to change my stance on Meta… they’re not really trying to create the best AGI model, but they are trying to create the best AI media models. Given their insane distribution, this is a good thing.
Samsung is The World’s Most Profitable
Yes, Samsung.
Samsung’s Q2 numbers are quite frankly nuts. $58.5B in operating profit in a single quarter (thats $650M earned every day)… up nearly 20X from a year ago and sailing past Nvidia’s $53.5B to take the crown.
Samsung’s chip division expects to earn more in 2026 than it earned in its entire previous 40 YEARS in the semiconductor business combined.
Why are they printing cash?
AI data centers need lots of memory, and DRAM prices rose ~90% in Q1, another 50-60% in Q2, and Samsung is negotiating another hike for Q3. Memory sales now make up 94% of the entire business’s profit. HBM is sold out into 2027. The windfall is so large, Samsung is paying its chip workers a $26.6B bonus pool which is roughly $400K per employee lol.
I’d love to tell you this is the peak of the bubble, but I honestly don’t know. I don’t see AI models needing less memory, and the demand needed for AI agents, new model weights, etc is insatiable atm.
Weekend Read: The AI 2027 Sequel
The team behind AI 2027, the viral essay that predicted a mad scramble to superintelligence, ending in either AI takeover or extreme concentration of power has now released a sequel: AI 2040: Plan A.
Here’s the tl;dr - humanity deliberately delays superintelligence until 2040 while AI research goes public, and loads of companies reach the frontier instead of two or three. The US and China enter a verified mutual slowdown and along the way they sketch an America with two workforces: 165 million humans, plus millions of AI agents spun up and shut down every hour.
My problem with this is it seems too optimistic:
I don’t see China agreeing to a mutual slowdown
I don’t see Anthropic or OpenAI slowing down research to allow competitors to catch up
That’s not how the capitalist mindset works, no matter how hard we force it. Im not saying I don’t wish it to happen… I just think its unrealistic.
For what its worth, they still believe the original AI 2027 essay is the default path, and the team’s own odds of AI-driven human extinction range from 10% to 30%. Plan A is basically the Hail Mary.
Give it a read and lmk what you think.
Thanks for joining us for another issue. Now go listen to our podcast :)