GPT 5.5 is alive!

Top News

• GPT 5.5 released: The world got a look at the latest model from OpenAI this week. The company claims their newest is better at completing complex tasks with less human oversight than ever before, while also streamlining software development and upgrading its capacity for scientific inquiry. Co-founder Greg Brockman claims GPT-5.5 is better at dealing with ambiguity, and provides a more “intuitive experience” for human users. Of course, most of the early promotional focus is on the model’s skill at coding, as every large AI lab sets its sights on enterprise customers and competing with Anthropic’s Claude Code. For their part, Mashable reports that Claude Opus 4.7 maintains an edge on “advanced and agentic coding,” but notes that “GPT-5.5 performs better on most benchmarks.”

• Meta fires workers to pay for AI upgrades: As Jason quipped on Friday’s TWiST, Meta founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made his choice: machines over humans. The Instagram and Facebook owners announced plans to lay off about 10% of their total human workforce — around 8,000 people — while also leaving vacant 6,000 positions for which they were originally going to hire new staffers. As Chief People Officer Janelle Gale confirmed in a memo to staff, the cuts are intended to help management “run the company more efficiently” and also, notably, “to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.” (She means chips and data centers!) Within 24 hours, Meta made good on its word, announcing a new multi-billion dollar, multi-year deal to rent Amazon’s stockpile of Gavitron chips for powering AI training and inference. So even if AI tools don’t actually take over a specific human’s job, they might lose the position anyway, just to offset the infrastructure costs of those AI tools. Neat.

• ComfyUI valued at $500M: The startup was founded as an open-source project in 2023, and provides a helpful interface for users working with various diffusion-based text-to-image models. In the early days of AI-generated media, models like Stable Diffusion, OpenAI’s DALL-E, and Midjourney were far more mistake-prone than they are today. Comfy devised a framework that gives creators more fine-tuned control over these models’ outputs. While the baseline models have improved significantly, so has Comfy’s platform. As co-founder/CEO Yoland Yan explains to TechCrunch, today’s text-to-image, vdieo, and audio models can still only get to about 80% effectiveness from prompts alone. That still gives Comfy plenty of wiggle room to upgrade the overall experience. They raised a $30 million funding round at a $500M valuation, led by (friend of the pod David Sacks’) Craft Ventures.

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OpenAI’s not the only high-profile model maker with a big release this week. Chinese open-source legends DeepSeek also unveiled their latest contributions: V4 Flash and V4 Pro. They arrive with the usual benchmark brags — upgrades to coding abilities along with reasoning and agentic tasks, according to the company’s release on Hugging Face. DeepSeek is also calling attention to an innovation they call “Hybrid Attention Architecture,” which apparently improves the models’ ability to recall specifics over the course of long sessions and conversations.

The AI world has paid particularly close attention to new DeepSeek releases since early 2025, when the surprisingly high quality of the company’s R1 model proved that Chinese open source alternatives could realistically compete with frontier closed models from major US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. In the year and change since, the industry has largely adjusted to the idea that large and costly models from major US firms have nearly-as-good, cheaper overseas competitors. While DeepSeek’s releases remain at least a few months behind Claude and GPT on major benchmark tests.

In more international AI news, Canadian lab Cohere announced plans to scoop up a German AI company, Aleph Alpha, as it attempts to push into the European market. (The deal has not yet closed, as it will require regulatory approval first.) Aleph Alpha backer Schwarz Group also plans to invest $600 million in Cohere’s latest Series E funding round, which the company hopes to close some time this year.

Cohere trains LLMs and builds AI products for enterprises. Aleph Alpha once pursued similar goals, but has more recently narrowed their scope to just developing AI apps. They’ll help Cohere release and fine-tune specialized AI products for a few major industries, including finance, defense, energy, and healthcare. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2279: SpaceX and Cursor are building a frontier model together, and later this year, SpaceX has the option to buy the AI coding company outright for $60 billion, or pay them $10 billion for their work. Alex and Lon break down the deal on a special TWiST. Then we chat with Chris Zacharia and Brian McCrindle, the founders of Bitstarter, the Kickstarter for Bittensor, and Ning Ren of competitive skill marketplace TrajectoryRL.

E2278: Jason and Lon greet Eragon CEO Josh Sirota, who argues that companies are giving away too much proprietary data to model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Instead, his company trains custom models for companies based on all of their documents, which they own and control. Plus we’ve got IONA Drones founder Etienne Louvet discussing why his company is licensing their aviation delivery tech to logistics operators rather than going direct to customers (like rival Zipline).

E2277: Jason Ballard of ICON joins the show to talk about how 3D printing homes can not just help us solve the housing crisis, and help humanity colonize the cosmos, but could also lead the way to a more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing future. Plus Jason and Lon chat with Seby Rubino of Resi Labs about designing the “oracle,” which can guess the price of any home with 98% accuracy. Is this a potential Zillow Killer?

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