87 releases covered on ThursdAI · openai.com ↗
OpenAI Codex Mobile arrives in the ChatGPT mobile apps
OpenAI's Codex Mobile is now available in the ChatGPT mobile apps, enabling remote agent workflows from a phone. The crew discussed it as part of the broader shift toward driving coding agents from anywhere rather than just the desktop.
OpenAI model makes progress on 80-year-old Erdős planar unit distance problem
OpenAI announced that a general-purpose reasoning model made progress on the Erdős planar unit distance problem, challenging an 80-year-old mathematical belief. The panel called it the most important news of the week outside Google I/O, as a sign that frontier reasoning models are starting to contribute to genuinely open mathematics.
OpenAI launches Daybreak, a frontier AI cybersecurity platform
OpenAI announced Daybreak, a frontier AI cybersecurity platform that pairs GPT-5.5 with Codex for security workloads. It launches with partners including Cloudflare, positioning OpenAI directly in the AI-powered defense market.
/goal command lands in Codex, Claude Code, and Hermes - the productized Ralph
The /goal command is now available in Codex, Claude Code, and Hermes, productizing the Ralph loop pattern: set a measurable success condition and the agent iterates autonomously until it is done. Codex's implementation is winning early head-to-head comparisons over Claude Code, and the show framed it as turning coding agents into 24/7 AI employees.
OpenAI publishes postmortem on GPT-5.5's 'goblin mode'
OpenAI published a research blog explaining GPT-5.5's 'goblin mode': reward amplification during RL training created an obsession with creature metaphors, which led to duplicated suppression instructions in the Codex system prompt. The leaked GPT-5.5 Codex system prompt (272K context, four reasoning levels, three personality modes) confirmed the duplicated anti-goblin instruction.
OpenAI releases clinician/medical model and workspace agents
Amid its launch-heavy week, OpenAI also released a clinician/medical model alongside workspace agents. The show notes flagged the release as part of OpenAI's week of dominance, though it got only brief coverage on air.
Codex gets background computer use on macOS plus Chronicle screen memory
Codex shipped true background computer use on macOS: a second cursor running on its own thread that works while you work, with subagents controlling different windows in parallel, building on OpenAI's Software Apps Inc. (ex-Apple Shortcuts team) acquisition. Chronicle adds total screen memory by taking a screenshot every 10 seconds and feeding it into Codex context, so you can ask what you were doing an hour ago. Codex also passed 4 million users this week.
OpenAIDevs releases Euphony, an open-source Codex session log visualizer
The OpenAI developer relations team released Euphony, an open-source visualizer for Codex session logs. It lets developers inspect and replay what their Codex agent sessions actually did.
GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro drop live, SOTA across the board
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro mid-show, taking state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2 (82.7%, up from 75%), SWE-Bench Verified (73%), GDPval (84%) and Frontier Math (35%), beating Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1. It uses ~40% fewer tokens than 5.4, netting roughly 20% cheaper to run despite API pricing doubling to $5/$30 per million ($30/$180 for Pro). Peter Gostev called it the first model that genuinely sustains multi-hour long-running tasks, with one task running 8.5 hours straight; rollout was Codex-first, not yet in ChatGPT.
OpenAI open-sources a 1.5B privacy/PII filter that runs in the browser
OpenAI open-sourced a tiny 1.5B MoE model with only 50M active parameters under Apache 2.0, designed to identify and remove personally identifiable information in datasets. It runs fully in the browser on WebGPU via Xenova's Transformers.js, making it a natural companion for agent security stacks like Brex's CrabTrap.
OpenAI Codex adds macOS background computer use, 90+ plugins, and memory
OpenAI dropped a massive Codex update mid-show: native macOS computer use that runs in the background with its own separate cursor so you can keep working, 90+ plugins, gpt-image-1.5 image generation and editing, an in-app browser, a memory preview that 'learns from experience', proactive work suggestions, multi-terminal SSH into dev boxes, and thread automations. Alex's hot take: Codex, not ChatGPT, is becoming OpenAI's super-app.
Codex hits 3M WAU with plugins, sub-agents and Guardian Approvals
OpenAI's Codex reached 3M weekly active users, up from 2M last month, as VB from the Codex team walked through what's behind it: plugins that bundle skills plus MCP servers (Stripe, Supabase, shadcn), sub-agents that decompose tasks into parallel Codex agents, and experimental hooks. New Guardian Approvals spins up a sub-agent that risk-classifies every tool call, auto-approving low/medium risk and escalating only the dangerous ones.
OpenAI's GPT-Image-2 leaks on LM Arena under three codenames
OpenAI's GPT-Image-2 posted the biggest single jump ever recorded on Arena, sitting 200+ ELO points above the previous top image model even on medium reasoning. The thinking/reasoning image model generates functioning QR codes, pixel-perfect infographics, 4K output, multi-image character consistency, and equirectangular 360-degree images that Peter Gostev stitched into a walkable street-view reconstruction of ancient Babylon. It even produces screenshots of IDEs containing SVG code that actually renders, enabling a new design-then-implement meta with Codex.
OpenAI closes $122B funding round at $852B valuation
OpenAI closed a reported $122 billion funding round, described as the largest in history, at an $852B valuation with an IPO said to be incoming. The panel discussed what that scale of capital implies for AI infrastructure spending, product velocity, and competitive pressure across the market.
OpenAI acquires live tech media show TBPN
OpenAI acquired TBPN, the live tech media show, for a rumored price in the low hundreds of millions. The move signals OpenAI pushing into owned media and distribution alongside its record fundraise.
OpenAI acquires Astral, makers of uv and Ruff, to join the Codex team
OpenAI acquired Astral, the company behind the uv Python package manager, Ruff, and ty, with the team joining Codex specifically — OpenAI's third acquisition of the month. The panel drew the parallel to Anthropic buying Bun for TypeScript infrastructure: OpenAI now owns core Python tooling for the code its agents write. The tools remain open source and forkable.
OpenAI ships subagents for Codex with custom TOML configs
OpenAI added subagents to Codex, enabling parallel specialized agents configured via custom TOML files. Paired with the cheap GPT-5.4 Mini and Nano models, this enables the orchestrator-plus-workers pattern where a flagship model spawns inexpensive parallel subagents for tasks like visual testing.
OpenAI ships GPT-5.4 Mini and Nano for coding, computer use, and subagents
OpenAI released GPT-5.4 Mini ($0.75/M input) and Nano, smaller variants optimized for coding and computer use at a fraction of flagship cost. Mini hits 72% on OS World verified, matching the human baseline and nearly reaching full 5.4's 75%, while beating Sonnet 4.5 on most benchmarks. They are designed as cheap parallel subagent workers under a GPT-5.4 orchestrator in Codex, and Mini is 2x faster than the previous GPT-5 Mini.
OpenAI launches the Codex app on Windows
OpenAI brought its Codex desktop app to Windows, expanding the agentic coding tool beyond its initial platforms. Mentioned in the TL;DR tools and agentic engineering rundown.
OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.3 Instant as the free-tier fast model
OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.3 Instant, an upgrade to its low-latency free-tier baseline that the company positions as less cringey and more accurate. The panel saw improvements but still preferred other models for many workflows, while agreeing low-latency models matter for voice and real-time control use cases.
OpenAI drops GPT-5.4 Thinking and GPT-5.4 Pro live during the show
OpenAI released GPT-5.4 Thinking and GPT-5.4 Pro mid-show, a frontier general model that folds Codex-level coding into a unified reasoning model. It ships with a 1M token context window, a /fast mode, and mid-reasoning steering, posting 83.3% on ARC-AGI 2 (Pro) and roughly 75% on OS World computer use. The panel tested it live in Codex and called it a major general-model jump, while noting input pricing rose about 50% versus 5.2.
OpenAI releases Symphony on GitHub
Ryan Carson experimented with OpenAI's Symphony framework, letting agents work through PRs overnight. One agent not only created a PR but found a bug and filed its own detailed Jira ticket with no human intervention, a small but telling sign of where agentic development is heading.
OpenAI releases gpt-audio-1.5 and gpt-realtime-1.5
OpenAI shipped gpt-audio-1.5 and gpt-realtime-1.5, updated audio and realtime voice models available through its platform. The release was covered in the week's voice and audio roundup.
OpenAI acqui-hires OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger
OpenAI acqui-hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of the viral OpenClaw agent, in what the panel speculated might be the first single-founder billion-dollar deal. Yam Peleg broke the news on the show, calling Steinberger 'the goat'. The move lands the most popular third-party agent harness builder inside OpenAI, amid a week where Anthropic's terms changes pushed agent users toward OpenAI subscriptions.
OpenAI upgrades Deep Research to GPT-5.2 with app integrations
OpenAI upgraded Deep Research to run on GPT-5.2, adding app integrations, site-specific searches, and real-time collaboration. Part of the week's rapid-fire big-lab announcements covered in the TLDR rundown.
OpenAI ships GPT 5.3 Codex Spark on Cerebras for real-time coding
OpenAI released GPT 5.3 Codex Spark, a smaller Codex variant built for real-time coding, served on Cerebras hardware — OpenAI's first model on Cerebras — with reported speeds of over 1000 tokens/sec. Available to ChatGPT Pro users in the Codex app, CLI, and IDE extension. It broke during the show as the second breaking-news drop of the episode.
OpenAI launches standalone Codex app for managing parallel coding agents
OpenAI shipped Codex as a dedicated Mac app, a command center for running multiple AI coding agents in parallel. Features include work trees for parallel project branches, scheduled automations, a skills marketplace with Cloudflare, Vercel, Figma, Notion, and Linear integrations, inline diff review with per-line commenting, and cloud hand-off. OpenAI granted a free month of access to all users including the free tier, and doubled rate limits for all tiers for two months.
OpenAI Frontier: enterprise platform for AI agents as coworkers
OpenAI launched Frontier, an enterprise platform to build, deploy, and manage AI agents as 'AI coworkers'. It targets companies that want to operationalize agents across their organizations.
OpenAI answers Opus with GPT-5.3-Codex, first model that helped build itself
One hour after Opus 4.6, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, billed as the first model instrumental in developing itself — the Codex team used early versions to debug its own training and manage its own deployment. It scores 73% on Terminal Bench 2.0, a 10-point gap over Opus 4.6, while running queries 25% faster and more token-efficiently than its predecessor, with improved mid-task steerability.
Klein team acqui-hired by OpenAI Codex
The Klein team was acqui-hired by OpenAI's Codex group following the viral 'imagine the smell' hackathon controversy. Discussed as part of the growing Codex ecosystem, which Peter Steinberger used to build Clawdbot entirely.
OpenAI begins testing ads in ChatGPT Free and Go tiers
OpenAI announced it is testing ads in the ChatGPT Free and Go tiers, framing the rollout around user trust and transparency. The company also announced age detection models for the upcoming adult mode, putting the memory and personalization data of 900M weekly active users in a new light.
OpenAI inks $10B deal with Cerebras for 750MW of high-speed compute
OpenAI announced a $10 billion partnership with Cerebras for 750 megawatts of high-speed inference compute, with capacity starting in 2028. It extends OpenAI's pattern of locking in massive compute supply deals beyond its existing cloud partners.
OpenAI acquires Torch Health to power GPT Health
OpenAI acquired Torch Health as part of its push into healthcare with GPT Health. The move came the same week Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare, with both labs racing toward HIPAA-ready medical AI products.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health waitlist with health record sync
OpenAI launched a waitlist for ChatGPT Health, a privacy-first vertical for health conversations with connected health records and fitness apps including Apple Health, Function Health, MyFitnessPal, and Peloton. The panel noted LLMs are well-suited to medicine since there are only ~2,000 diseases and ~2,000 prescription drugs to master.
ChatGPT gets persistent memory across conversations
In Q2, OpenAI shipped memory for ChatGPT, letting the assistant carry context across all of a user's past conversations. It was one of the quarter's notable product-layer upgrades alongside native image generation.
OpenAI Deep Research scores 26.6% on Humanity's Last Exam
OpenAI's Deep Research launched in February as an agentic research tool that scored 26.6% on Humanity's Last Exam, versus roughly 10% for o1 and R1. The crew called it a jaw-dropping leap in AI research capability and one of February's defining releases.
GPT-4o native image generation sparks Ghibli-mania
OpenAI shipped native image generation in GPT-4o, producing the viral Ghibli-style image wave and bringing AI image creation to the ChatGPT mainstream. Wolfram cited the 2025 paradigm shift in image generation as his release of the year.
GPT-5 Codex: OpenAI's specialized coding model moves the stock
GPT-5 Codex dropped in September as OpenAI's coding-specialized fine-tune of GPT-5. Yam dubbed it the 'infinite money glitch' because the release moved OpenAI-linked stock prices significantly.
OpenAI Operator: first agentic ChatGPT with browser control
OpenAI launched Operator in January as the first agentic version of ChatGPT that could control a browser to complete tasks on the user's behalf. It kicked off the year-of-agents narrative, though it launched within 24 hours of DeepSeek R1 and was completely overshadowed by it.
Project Stargate: $500B AI infrastructure commitment announced
Announced in January, Project Stargate committed $500 billion to AI infrastructure in the US — described on the show as the Manhattan Project for AI. It set the tone for a year in which investment numbers stopped making sense.
Sora 2 democratizes video generation and floods the internet with memes
Sora 2 opened Q4 in October by democratizing video generation, complete with a social platform, and spawned a wave of memes still circulating at year's end. The show's TL;DR credits it as part of 2025 crossing the uncanny valley for AI media.
OpenAI ships two new voice models derived from GPT Realtime
In March, OpenAI released two voice models derived from its GPT Realtime speech-to-speech stack. They were part of a wave that pushed voice agents toward the mainstream over the course of 2025.
ChatGPT App Store opens submissions via MCP app model
OpenAI opened app submissions for the ChatGPT App Store, built on the MCP-powered apps model. Developers can now submit apps that run inside ChatGPT, signaling OpenAI's platform play for distribution of agentic apps.
GPT 5.2 Codex drops live during the show with 400K context
OpenAI released GPT 5.2 Codex via API after months of exclusivity in the Codex app, making it available in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code with native context compaction for long sessions. Cursor showcased it by building a complete browser from scratch in Rust, roughly 3 million lines of code across about 330,000 commits, driven by hundreds of concurrent agents.
OpenAI GPT Image 1.5: 4x faster, 20% cheaper, #1 on LMSYS Image Arena
OpenAI released GPT Image 1.5, an upgraded image generation model that is 4x faster and 20% cheaper than its predecessor. It debuted at #1 on the LMSYS Image Arena leaderboard, part of OpenAI's rapid-fire release week.
OpenAI integrates ChatGPT Voice Mode directly into chats
OpenAI integrated ChatGPT's Voice Mode directly into the chat interface instead of a separate full-screen experience. Users can now talk to ChatGPT while seeing transcripts and visual responses inline in the conversation.
GPT-5.1-Codex-Max runs 24-hour coding tasks with native compaction
OpenAI's newest frontier agentic coding model is trained with native compaction, letting it intelligently summarize prior context and work on a single task for 24+ hours (an internal run reportedly lasted a full week). It uses 30% fewer thinking tokens at median than its predecessors and sets a new SOTA of 58% on TerminalBench 2, also leading on SWE-Bench and SWE-Lancer. Windows PowerShell support is significantly improved, alongside an experimental Windows sandbox and a new extra-high reasoning level.
GPT-5.1 Pro: research-grade deep-thinking mode in ChatGPT
OpenAI also shipped GPT-5.1 Pro, a new research-grade ChatGPT mode that will happily think for minutes on a single query. It targets hard research-style questions where extended deliberation pays off, rounding out OpenAI's big week alongside Codex-Max.
OpenAI launches GPT-5.1 with a warmer, more personable voice
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model focused on a warmer tone and personality upgrades. The panel discussed how the friendlier default voice changes day-to-day ChatGPT use and what it signals for the frontier model race.
OpenAI ships GPT-OSS-Safeguard, first open-weight safety reasoning models
OpenAI released GPT-OSS-Safeguard, its first open-weight safety reasoning models, built on the GPT-OSS family. The models let developers apply custom safety policies via reasoning rather than fixed classifiers, extending OpenAI's open-weights push into the trust-and-safety layer.
Sora drops invite requirement and adds Character Cameos
OpenAI removed the invite requirement for the Sora app and shipped Character Cameos, letting users create reusable characters that can appear across generated videos. The update widens access to Sora as OpenAI pushes it as a consumer video product.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Atlas, its agentic AI browser
OpenAI shipped Atlas, a Chromium-based browser deeply integrated with ChatGPT: natural-language history search, a 'Cursor' inline text-rewrite tool, browsing-pattern memories, and an Ask ChatGPT sidepane. Its agent mode runs with your logged-in sessions and cookies, enabling long multi-step tasks (Alex had it complete a 5-hour compliance training) but raising prompt-injection security concerns that OpenAI's CISO addressed publicly. macOS only at launch, for Pro, Plus, and Go tiers.
OpenAI and Broadcom to deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators
OpenAI announced a strategic collaboration with Broadcom to co-develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators. It is another massive compute commitment in OpenAI's infrastructure buildout, this time with chips designed in-house.
OpenAI ships smarter ChatGPT memory management, no more 'memory full'
OpenAI updated ChatGPT's memory system so it automatically manages and prioritizes saved memories, eliminating the 'memory full' dead end. The change makes long-running personalized use of ChatGPT smoother without manual memory pruning.
Sora extends generations to 15s (25s Pro) and adds storyboards
OpenAI upgraded Sora with longer generations, up to 15 seconds for standard users and 25 seconds for Pro, plus a new storyboard feature for multi-shot control. The update keeps Sora competitive as video models race on length and controllability.
OpenAI previews ChatGPT Pulse proactive daily briefings
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Pulse, a preview feature that proactively researches overnight and delivers personalized daily briefing cards based on your chats, memory, and connected apps, initially for Pro users on mobile. On the show it was discussed as part of OpenAI's push to build a durable product moat as raw model access commoditizes.
OpenAI launches GDPval to measure models on real economic work
OpenAI introduced GDPval, an evaluation that measures model performance on real-world, economically valuable tasks drawn from a range of occupations and GDP sectors. On the show it anchored the discussion about agents moving from chat quality toward action and reliability in real environments.
OpenAI adds thinking budgets to the ChatGPT app
OpenAI rolled out thinking budgets in the ChatGPT app, letting users control how much reasoning effort the model spends on a request. It is a small but notable product lever for tuning the cost-versus-quality tradeoff of reasoning models.
OpenAI ships GPT-5-Codex, an agentic coding upgrade for Codex
OpenAI released GPT-5-Codex, a version of GPT-5 finetuned for agentic coding inside the Codex product family. It anchors the episode's coding discussion, with the panel focusing on how coding models are becoming trustworthy enough for longer, productized agent workflows rather than just one-shot completions.
NBER & OpenAI publish 'How People Use ChatGPT' usage study
OpenAI and NBER published a working paper analyzing ChatGPT usage growth, demographics, and scale. The study gives the first rigorous public look at how the consumer ChatGPT user base actually behaves, feeding the episode's closing discussion of usage stats and momentum.
OpenAI fundraises $10B at ~$500B valuation with employee buyback
OpenAI was reported to be raising around $10B at a roughly $500B valuation, structured in part as a share buyback for employees. Together with Anthropic's Series F, it underscored the episode's theme that frontier-lab funding has reached unprecedented scale.
OpenAI ships gpt-realtime and takes the Realtime API to GA
OpenAI shipped the gpt-realtime speech-to-speech model and moved the Realtime API to general availability. The GA release adds remote MCP tool support, image input, and SIP phone calling, making it a full production stack for voice agents and tying into the episode's voice-agents discussion with Kwindla Kramer.
OpenAI opens ChatGPT Projects to free users with bigger uploads
OpenAI rolled out Projects to free ChatGPT users, adding larger file uploads and project-only memory controls. The change brings organized, memory-scoped workspaces to the free tier rather than keeping them behind paid plans.
OpenAI acquires Statsig and Alex for $1.1B+ to bolster applications team
OpenAI acquired experimentation platform Statsig and the Alex coding tool for a combined $1.1B+, a move aimed at strengthening its applications team. Statsig's founder reportedly takes on a senior product role as OpenAI invests in shipping consumer and developer products faster.
OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode can now sing
OpenAI updated ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode with new capabilities, including the ability to sing. Part of a week where voice interfaces kept converging on more natural, expressive interaction.
OpenAI brings the previously API-only GPT-4.1 models into ChatGPT
OpenAI's GPT-4.1 series, previously available only via the API, is now selectable in the ChatGPT interface. The crew used the news to dig into model-picker UX: seven model options in the dropdown, each with its own quirks, speed, and context length, while most casual users don't even know the dropdown exists.
HealthBench: OpenAI's physician-crafted benchmark for AI in healthcare
OpenAI released HealthBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI models on healthcare scenarios, built with input from physicians. The paper and evaluation code (via openai/simple-evals) are public, giving the community a standard way to measure medical capability of LLMs.
ChatGPT adds shopping capabilities
OpenAI rolled out shopping features in ChatGPT, letting the assistant find and recommend products for users. Mentioned briefly in the big-companies roundup amid the week's OpenAI sycophancy drama.
OpenAI's GPT Image generation lands in the API as gpt-image-1
OpenAI's powerful image generation capabilities, previously locked inside ChatGPT, are now available to developers via API under the official name gpt-image-1. This was the big one many developers were waiting for, opening up the viral image generation and editing capabilities for building AI art and image editing applications.
OpenAI debuts Codex CLI, an open source terminal coding agent
OpenAI released Codex CLI, an open source coding tool for the terminal. It ships with hardened security, using Apple Seatbelt on macOS to limit execution to the current directory plus temp files.
OpenAI launches GPT-4.1 family (4.1, mini, nano) in the API
OpenAI released the GPT-4.1 family of models, available via API only, in three sizes: 4.1, 4.1-mini and 4.1-nano. The family features a 1M token context window, in contrast to o3's 200k, and is aimed at developers building on long-context and coding workloads.
OpenAI open sources the MRCR long-context benchmark dataset
OpenAI open sourced MRCR, a benchmark dataset for evaluating long-context, complex retrieval tasks, building on Gemini research from Google and publishing the dataset on Hugging Face.
OpenAI launches o3 and o4-mini, SOTA reasoning models with tool use
OpenAI shipped o3 and o4-mini in ChatGPT and the API, with o3 setting new SOTA records on Codeforces, SWE-bench, MMMU and more. For the first time the models can use tools (web search, Python, image generation) during the reasoning process, and they can think visually by cropping, zooming and rotating images. o3 scored $65k on the Freelancer eval versus o1's $28k, and o4-mini hits 99.5% on AIME with a Python interpreter.
OpenAI gives ChatGPT enhanced memory that can recall all your past chats
OpenAI rolled out enhanced memory for ChatGPT, allowing it to reference and recall all of a user's previous conversations rather than just saved memories. This makes ChatGPT significantly more personalized across sessions.
OpenAI raises $40B at a $300B valuation
OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation, one of the largest private raises ever. The show noted the raise rode the wave of native image generation in ChatGPT, with especially strong growth in India.
OpenAI ships new EMO "Monday" voice in ChatGPT
OpenAI added a new "Monday" voice to ChatGPT's voice mode, an EMO-flavored persona released around April 1st. It rounds out a week of OpenAI shipping across models, evals, and product.
OpenAI releases PaperBench eval and open-sources Nano-Eval framework
OpenAI published PaperBench, a tough new evaluation that tests whether AI agents can replicate cutting-edge AI research papers, with more than 8,300 graded tasks and meta-evaluation of the LLM judge. The best model managed only a 21.0% replication score versus 41.4% for human PhDs. The code and the Nano-Eval framework were open sourced on GitHub alongside the paper.
OpenAI updates ChatGPT advanced voice mode with semantic VAD
Alongside the image generation launch, OpenAI quietly updated ChatGPT's advanced voice mode with semantic voice activity detection. The model now understands when you have actually finished speaking rather than cutting in on pauses, leading to much more natural conversation flow.
GPT-4o gets an update, ties for #1 on LMArena beating GPT-4.5
OpenAI shipped a new GPT-4o checkpoint (2025-03-26) that jumped over GPT-4.5 to tie for #1 on LMArena. The update landed as the show was being written, read as a direct response to Gemini 2.5's launch in the escalating frontier-model race.
OpenAI enables native image generation in GPT-4o, internet goes Ghibli
OpenAI finally enabled GPT-4o's native auto-regressive image generation in ChatGPT, sparking the biggest mainstream AI buzz of the week as the internet ghiblified itself. Launched right after Gemini 2.5, it excels at instruction following, text rendering, and multi-turn editing, with viral demos ranging from ad mockups to a full Lord of the Rings trailer.
OpenAI adopts Anthropic's Model Context Protocol - MCP won
OpenAI officially announced support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in its Agents SDK, effectively settling the agent tool-connectivity standards war in MCP's favor. Possibly more impactful long-term than the week's flashier launches, since the entire ecosystem can now converge on one protocol for connecting models to tools and data.
OpenAI launches steerable voice model and two new transcription models
OpenAI launched a new emotionally steerable text-to-speech voice model plus two new transcription models, watched live on the show as a watch party. The TTS model can be instructed how to speak (tone, emotion, character), demoed at openai.fm, and the models are available through the API for voice agents.
OpenAI makes o1-pro available via API at $600 per 1M output tokens
OpenAI exposed its o1-pro reasoning model through the API for the first time, priced at $600 per million output tokens. The show jokingly framed the pricing as 'for oligarchs', but it makes OpenAI's highest-compute reasoning tier programmatically accessible.
OpenAI launches Responses API with Web Search, File Search, and Computer Use
OpenAI announced a new agent-focused developer stack at a livestream: the Responses API, a new way to build with OpenAI designed for agentic workloads, plus an Agents SDK. It ships with three built-in tools: Web Search, a File Search tool providing built-in RAG over your files, and a Computer Use tool for agents that operate computer interfaces.
OpenAI ships GPT-4.5, its largest model yet at roughly 10x scale
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 as breaking news during the show, its first .5-scale jump in two years and reportedly around 10x the scale of the previous model, with speculation of 10+ trillion parameters. Sam Altman said it 'won't crush on benchmarks' against reasoning models, but early vibes praised its creative writing, vision, and medical diagnosis abilities, and it is expected to fuel future o-series reasoners trained on top of it.
OpenAI launches Operator, an agentic browser for ChatGPT Pro
OpenAI launched Operator, an agentic browser-use product that performs tasks for you on the web, available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers at operator.chatgpt.com. As Sam Altman framed it on the launch stream: you give agents a task and they go off and do it.
Stargate Project: $500B AI infrastructure investment announced
OpenAI, SoftBank (Masayoshi Son's Vision Fund), and Oracle (Larry Ellison) announced the Stargate Project, a planned $500 billion investment in US AI infrastructure. The announcement, made alongside the White House, was framed on the show as an AI 'Manhattan Project'-scale buildout of datacenters and compute.
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