ChatGPT 5.5 Coming Soon?

Today on the AI Daily Brief, what the AI rumor mill says about when we might get the next big model. And before that in the headlines, Microsoft coming in hot with some plans to make people less mad about data centers and electricity. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Reef Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. 2026 is an election year, and it's been clear for some time that AI was going to find its way into the political discourse. The odds-on bet for how it does make it there is less about AI itself, although there's plenty of issues that people have, and more about the broader theme, which is very clearly going to dominate this election cycle, which is affordability. In short...

To the extent that data centers are perceived to be a contributor to higher costs of living for Americans, those data centers and the larger AI industry are going to have a not-so-fun time politically. Indeed, as he goes after a number of different affordability issues. Donald Trump has turned his attention and his Truth Social account on this particular one as well. On Monday he wrote, I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers.

Therefore, my administration is working with major American technology companies to secure their commitment to the American people. And we will have much to announce in the coming weeks. First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with.

and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills. We are the hottest country in the world and number one in AI. Data centers are key to that boom and keeping Americans free and secure, but...

The big technology companies who build them must pay their own way. Thank you and congratulations to Microsoft. More to come soon. Now, it is way beyond the scope of this headlines episode to get into the full complexity of why electricity costs are up and what percentage of it is actually from AI.

But frankly, I think all of those are completely losing political arguments, and all that matters is basically exactly what President Trump is getting at here, which is the perception of whether the big companies are not only picking up the tab for themselves, but perhaps even paying a little bit more to try to make this viable for everyone else.

Now, people have been talking about this type of policy for a while. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya started tweeting about it somewhere in the middle of last year and kept it up throughout the fall. For example, in October writing, the hyperscaler should take the electricity cost of local residents to zero and start buying goodwill.

Otherwise, I expect more local communities to push back on these data centers, which will complicate the AI buildout that needs to happen. So what did Microsoft actually announce? In a blog post on Tuesday from Vice Chair and President Brad Smith,

The company wrote about a five-part plan to build what they're calling community-first AI infrastructure. They write that the plan commits them to concrete steps needed to be a good neighbor in the communities where they build, own, and operate their data centers. So what are the five parts of their plan?

The first is that they'll pay their own way to ensure their data centers don't increase other people's electricity prices. Basically, they say they're going to pay utility rates that are high enough to cover their electricity costs and make sure it doesn't get passed on to the communities in which they're operating.

Pillar 2 is they commit to trying to minimize their water use and replenish even more of the community's water than they use. Pillar 3 is to create jobs for residents. Pillar 4 is to add to the tax base to fund local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries.

And pillar five is to strengthen the community by investing in local AI training and nonprofits. Now, it's totally easy to be cynical about any corporate initiative like this. But for my money, this is exactly the type of thing that needs to happen from all of the big tech companies who are in the midst of this infrastructure build out.

Frankly, I think it's a complete own goal that with something like this, where there is so much opportunity for these data centers to actually be good for the communities that they're in, that we have completely missed that boat until now. I'm glad to see Microsoft taking this on. And frankly, I think they can go even farther.

I think Chamath is right. I think they should be going way beyond just paying their own share and frankly, just buying the goodwill of the community that they're in. Ultimately, that is such a small fraction of the cost of these data centers that doing it to me just seems like a no-brainer.

Still, this is good progress, and I want to encourage Microsoft and everyone else in a similar space to double down on this type of initiative. Now, moving over to a story that has been up and down and over and under and never quite clear.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Chinese customs officials have told customs agents that NVIDIA's H200 chips are not permitted to enter the country. Their sources said that tech companies were also summoned to meetings where they were explicitly told not to order chips unless necessary. One of the Reuters sources commented,

The wording from the officials is so severe that it is basically a ban for now, though this might change in the future should things evolve. Now, the information has a slightly different sourcing on the story, who said that the directive from Beijing was quote deliberately vague.

They said that the imports were limited to special circumstances, which included university research and R&D. Both reports used the word necessary to describe the limitations, but the difference was in how each source interpreted the CCP directive. Later that day, the US Commerce Department finalized their approval for H-200 exports, but also with a few conditions. The chips will be inspected by a third-party testing lab to confirm their AI capabilities before they can be shipped to China.

Nvidia is also limited to shipping 50% as many chips to China as they sell to US customers. On the Chinese side of the deal, customers will need to demonstrate quote-unquote sufficient security procedures and cannot use the chips for military purposes. In a statement, NVIDIA said that the approval, quote, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America. And yet, while all that paperwork is finalized, it's unclear if NVIDIA can actually start shipping anytime soon due to the Beijing bans.

Some China analysts do believe this is a power play in the lead-up to trade negotiations in April. Geopolitical strategist Reva Gojin writes, Beijing is pushing to see what bigger concessions they can get to dismantle U.S.-led tech controls. Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, commented,

Beijing believes the US is desperate to sell AI chips to China, so it believes China has the leverage to extract concessions from the US in exchange for license approvals. Now, it's an open question whether the Trump administration is desperate to sell AI chips. But the potential for an NVIDIA-led stock market drawdown during an election year could be a motivating factor. Staying on the chip train, chip-making startup Cerebris is in talks to raise a billion dollars at a $22 billion valuation.

Bloomberg sources confirmed that fundraising efforts were underway, but added no major details. The company was aiming to IPO last year, but scuttled plans in October, shortly after completing a fundraising round at an $8 billion valuation. Sources said the company still plans to IPO.

with rumors suggesting the aim is to go public in the second half of this year. In M&A land, OpenAI has acquired a tiny health tech startup called Torch. The company operates a platform to unify medical records including lab results, prescriptions, and appointment notes. while storing them in a format that's easily discoverable for AI. Co-founder Ilya Abazov wrote, We designed Torch to be a unified medical memory for AI.

bringing every bit of data about you from hospitals, labs, wearables, and consumer testing companies into one place. I can't imagine a better next chapter than to now get to put our technology and ideas in the hands of the hundreds of millions of people who already use ChatCPT for health questions every week.

Now, OpenAI didn't announce the value of the acquisition, but sources speaking with the information said the price tag was $100 million paid in OpenAI equity. Not bad for a four-person team. Lots cooking is always in the world of AI, but for now, that is going to do it for the headlines. Next up.

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Today we are talking about the latest leaks slash rumors about the next ChatGPT model, but I think it's important to put all of this in its proper context. Let's do a quick hit of the last five months of OpenAI model releases. Things started pretty inauspiciously in August with the release of GPT-5. Now we've gone over lots of times all of the problems with the GPT-5 release.

One very big problem was the deprecation of 4.0 alongside it, which had people angry at them for reasons that had nothing to do with the model's performance, and everything to do with other changes that were being made at the same time. We've also discussed how if they had simply called their biggest reasoning models like O3, GPT-5, the perception of the performance jump might have been very different. Basically, in some ways, they were kind of a victim of their own making.

Whatever the case, the context it came into was not a great moment for the narrative around AI, and GBD5 did nothing to alleviate that. That's when we were getting these, in retrospect, very silly op-eds in publications like The New Yorker. What if AI doesn't get much better than this?

Fast forward a couple months and the pressure was on for Google to deliver. There was a while there where I wasn't even sure that Google was actually going to drop Gemini 3 in November because of the amount of pressure they were under to get it right. But get it right they did, at least in the court of public opinion. When Gemini 3 came out,

People were extremely excited about it. They were impressed with Gemini 3 Pro as a model for their intellectual and work tasks, and of course, Nano Banana Pro's ability to make infographics opened up all sorts of totally new possible use cases. It turns out that OpenAI knew they were in for a rough patch.

Back in October, it turns out, Sam Altman had warned some staff in a memo that he expected some rough vibes around the launch of Google's new models. Rough vibes they got, ultimately leading to Altman and the team at OpenAI declaring a code red. Now, what this code red meant, in short...

was a cessation or at least a slowdown of work on a lot of ancillary features and products to double, triple, quadruple down on core ChatGPT features including the models underneath powering it. That got us to GPT 5.2 as well as the new ChatGPT images model.

Which is, it should be noted a 1.5 model, not a full jump to Image Gen 2. Now, 5.2 and the new ChatGPT images are good models. 5.2 Pro in particular is very much in my regular rotation. And when it comes to a lot of heavy intellectual work, there are many folks who swear by it.

Images, frankly, was better than I expected, given how much pressure they had to put that out given Nano Banana Pro. And so even though Gemini and Google had really won a ton of momentum, I do think that the ChatGPT releases in December maybe didn't fully stem the bleeding.

But for people who weren't interested in the horse race and just wanted high-performing models, you felt very lucky with all the options you had over the holiday season. But then, of course, around all of this was Claude Opus 4.5. The opinion on this model has done nothing but go up and up and up and up. So much so that in a last-minute upset, I actually said that I thought it might end up being the most important model release of 2025, and so far at least I think that argument is holding up.

Cloud Code, Opus 4.5, and AGI are terms that are very frequent co-inhabitants right now of tweets and posts on social networks. Since the beginning of the year, these companies have not slowed down. In a major move to bring Cloud Code to everybody else, Anthropic released co-work.

tripling down in that way on their source of narrative momentum, while Google and Apple announced a deal that was reported at the end of last year that forthcoming versions of Apple intelligence will be powered in fact by Gemini models. All of this has led to a sense of a lot of momentum around Anthropic and Google,

and kind of less so around open ai in fact last night i tweeted that open ai seemed to me to be almost conspicuously quiet which perhaps isn't totally fair given that they announced a major product in ChatGPT Health. But still, it feels to me both like something is percolating and also that perhaps the company decided to try to do a little bit less vague posting in this new 2026 year.

Yesterday, the rumor mill kicked back up in a big way. Dan Mack tweeted, GBT53, codenamed Garlic, coming soon according to a source, a very reliable source, batting 1,000, expected to be a doozy, likely with stronger pre-training and the IMO gold-winning reasoning techniques.

The AI leaker account, I rule the world, responded saying that they had also heard this month. And in a separate post shared something that they had told subscribers back in December that the 5-2 model that we got was a quote rushed early checkpoint and that the full model is going to drop in January.

Other speculation is that the model will be multimodal, generating both images and audio. Although no one seems quite clear on the naming conventions, whether it will be GPT-55 or even something like GPT-53. And of course, while these are all just rumors, although rumors with sourcing, there is also starting to be some evidence that some newness might be percolating and poking through. Andrew Curran tweeted, Now maybe I am wrong about the vague tweeting,

given that VB from OpenAI's developer experience team posted the eyes emoji getting everyone talking as part of this conversation as well. Obviously, anytime we get a new model, it's a very exciting moment. And certainly with the stakes as high as they are,

I would love to see a big powerful effort drop that shakes the race up once again. Now, believe it or not, that wasn't the only information in the AI rumor mill. A Chinese consumer electronics blogger has a new leak from their contacts and the supply chain. They wrote,

Hearing fresh detail on OpenAI 2Go hardware project from last report. Now confirmed it's a special audio product to replace AirPod. Internal codename is SweetP. On manufacturing, Foxconn has been told to prepare for a total of five devices by Q4 2028.

All are not known, but a home-style device and pen are still considered. However, many sources repeated the same thing. Sweet Pea is now front of the line due to the priority of the Johnny Ive team. The release has been told to be near September, volume projection $40-50 million in the first year.

only some details currently known hardware design is said to be unique unseen before and the main device is to be metal and resembling the shape of an eggstone inside the eggstone there are two pills who are removed and rest behind the ear

A custom chip is being developed to allow the device to replace iPhone actions by commanding Siri. And overall, Foxconn leaders are still embarrassed by losing all AirPods programs to Lux. Now they see this as a golden chance to win back the category. We had a show last year.

about how sneakily AirPods could be the most obvious AI device form factor that not enough people were thinking about in that way. And so it's interesting to see the OpenAI hardware team seemingly exploring some similar space, although of course something behind the ear is something totally different once again.

Now, moving away from OpenAI but staying in the new model pool, another report of a likely model to drop very soon is the next flagship DeepSeq model. The information reports that DeepSeq v4 will be released in mid-February and will have a heavy focus on coding performance. Writes the information, the new model V4 is a successor to the V3 model DeepSeq released in December 2024.

Initial tests done by DeepSeq employees based on the company's internal benchmarks showed that it outperformed existing models such as Anthropics Cloud and OpenAI's GPT series encoding the sources said. The report also states that v4 will showcase DeepSeq's advances in handling extremely long context windows, which of course is critical for large coding tasks. Now, obviously, it would be quite the shakeup to have a state-of-the-art open-source coding model.

But of course, we don't actually know how it'll perform until we see it. Some are convinced, though, that a model codenamed Beluga on LM Arena is our first look at the whale's next release. DeepSeek fan Tier Taxes is skeptical of the sourcing, but still believes the hype posting. I dunk on Breathless Insider leaks about V4, but nobody is more confident than me in what DeepSeek is about to achieve. Personally, in my opinion, it'll be the end of the road for Dario-style fantasies.

Developer Vasio posted, Feels like we're about to get another overnight jump that was clearly years in the making. DeepSeek was also in the Western press recently, for a different reason, with the founder of DeepSeek's quantitative hedge fund generating returns of 57% last year. Writes Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal,

Man, this dude's had a good couple of years. Now, if those are the forthcoming model rumors, we also got a small but real update in VO31 ingredients to video. The feature allows users to upload reference images for characters, props, and background to guide the video generation.

Google said the upgrade makes videos more expressive and creative even with simple prompts. They also promised better visual consistency across multiple scenes to ensure clips can be easily stitched together to tell a coherent story.

Vio can also now use ingredients to video when generating vertical videos for mobile, which wasn't previously possible. And in a last bit of lab news, which isn't a model right now, but could be an interesting product in the future, Anthropic has announced the expansion of their labs team into a full-blown internal incubator.

Anthropic Labs was started in mid-2024 with just two members and helped develop Claude Code, MCP, and more recently, Cowork. Labs will now become a more substantial part of the company, with Anthropic aiming to double the Labs headcount within the next six months. The expanded team will be co-led by Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger and Product Engineering Lead Ben Mann. The team will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amadei.

Now, if you want to hear more about how Mike thinks about building AI products, I did an interview with him as part of our end of year episodes, which you can find on YouTube or on this podcast feed. Ultimately, it sounds like a big part of the move is about restructuring the team so that Anthropik's product velocity can match the rapid pace of the industry, wrote Daniela.

The speed of advancement in AI demands a different approach in how we build, how we organize, and where we focus. Labs gives us room to break the mold and explore. Look, if it leads to more products like Cloud Code, I think most folks in the industry will say, count us in.

For now, that's the latest on what's cooking around the AI rumor mill. Hopefully, we get some real models in the next couple of weeks to explore. For now, though, I appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace.