#244 - GPT-5.5 Instant, Grok 4.3, OpenAI vs Musk

Our 244th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 05/08/2026

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

In this episode:

• OpenAI released GPT-5.5 Instant as ChatGPT’s new default model, showing large benchmark gains and crossing a “high” cyber-risk threshold under its preparedness framework, while bio-safety results were mixed.
• OpenAI investigated and patched ChatGPT’s “goblin” obsession, attributing it to reinforcement-learning rewards that over-amplified playful creature metaphors in a nerdy persona that later bled across versions.
• Major industry moves included xAI’s Grok 4.3 price cuts and voice tools, Mistral’s unified Medium 3.5 model and Work mode, and Anthropic’s managed-agent upgrades alongside a surprise SpaceX compute deal and reports of a much higher Anthropic valuation.
• Key policy and security developments covered the Musk–OpenAI trial details, Pentagon AI deployments on classified networks, expanded U.S. government pre-release model reviews, and reports of NSA testing Anthropic’s Mythos on Microsoft software.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:14) News Preview
• (00:04:39) Response to listener comments

• Tools & Apps
• (00:13:40) OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 Instant, a new default model for ChatGPT | TechCrunch
• (00:18:23) ChatGPT Became So Obsessed With Goblins That OpenAI Had to Intervene
• (00:27:14) xAI launches Grok 4.3 at an aggressively low price and a new, fast, powerful voice cloning suite | VentureBeat
• (00:33:49) Mistral's new flagship Medium 3.5 folds chat, reasoning, and code into one model
• (00:39:28) Anthropic updates Claude Managed Agents with three new features - 9to5Mac
• (00:43:42) ElevenLabs Revamps AI Music Platform as Fan-Focused Service

• Applications & Business
• (00:44:57) A diary, a threat, and a $30 billion stake: What the Musk vs OpenAI trial has actually shown in its first week - The Times of India
• (00:55:28) Anthropic, SpaceX Sign Deal to Boost AI Computing Power for Claude Software - Bloomberg
• (01:01:48) Anthropic in talks with investors to raise funds at $900 billion valuation, higher than OpenAI
• (01:02:37) Anthropic and OpenAI are both launching joint ventures for enterprise AI services | TechCrunch
• (01:06:15) Anthropic and FIS Are Building an AI Agent to Help Banks Police Financial Crimes
• (01:07:02) AMD’s revenue jumps 38 percent from last year as Q1 data center sales hit $5.8 billion. | The Verge
• (01:08:51) Banks seek to offload risk to avoid ‘choking’ on data centre debt
• (01:14:08) DeepSeek could be valued at up to $50 billion in first fundraising, sources say | Reuters

• Projects & Open Source
• (01:16:14) Natural Language Autoencoders Produce Unsupervised Explanations of LLM Activations
• (01:22:23) OpenAI just open-sourced its data center networking technology

• Policy & Safety
• (01:25:02) Pentagon inks deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS to deploy AI on classified networks | TechCrunch
• (01:27:27) Google, Microsoft, and xAI will allow the US government to review their new AI models | The Verge
• (01:32:11) NSA Testing Anthropic’s Mythos to Find Flaws in Microsoft Tech
• (01:35:42) Introspection Adapters: Training LLMs to Report Their Learned Behaviors

• Research & Advancements
• (01:41:18) Recursive Multi-Agent Systems
• (01:51:47) Frontier Coding Agents Can Now Implement an AlphaZero Self-Play Machine Learning Pipeline For Connect Four That Performs Comparably to an External Solver

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