ChatGPT 5.5: Analyzing New Features

SpaceX is telling its investors it wants to start building its own GPUs.

This is a massive deal because I think this is really just showing us how tight the compute

market has gotten. You have like a rocket company that is looking at building its own

silicone. We also have to talk about Microsoft teaming up with Anthropic to plug

Claw directly into their secure coding stack and OpenAI is quietly briefing federal agencies

on the new GPT 5.5 cyber model. There is a whole kind of AI meet cyber story that we are

seeing and this is playing out in a lot of different places. Also, Google dropped a very serious

agent platform on their cloud event this week. They have a 200 plus model in their model

garden and new tooling aimed exactly at OpenAI and Anthropic. I think this one is very interesting

because Google has been criticized for falling behind on the agent race. And so I think this is

basically their very clear response to that. We also have news from Meta. They are doing

layoffs of about 18,000 people which is about 10% of their workforce. Zuckerberg has pretty

openly pointed out that AI is the reason for this. Microsoft on the exact same day also announced

its first ever voluntary buyout program. This is targeted at about 8,700 employees. So I don't

think this is just a meta story. I think this is a story about how AI is starting to really reshape

payroll at the biggest companies on the planet. And then we're going to do a little bit of a deep

dive on OpenAI shipping GPT 5.5 yesterday. This is just six weeks after GPT 5.4 came out.

The benchmarks are wild. The pricing story is very interesting. And this is going to set a new

bar for a lot of agentic AI. So I'm going to unpack all of that on the show today.

Really quick, before we get into the stories, I wanted to tell you about AI box. This is the tool

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that is really useful for me personally is that I can build my own automations by just describing

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subscription to something like chat GPT. So if you're interested, go check it out. There is a

link in the description to AI box dot AI. So the biggest story that I wanted to kick off with is

SpaceX. There's reports that came out this week at SpaceX is telling their investors,

they're planning what they're calling a quote substantial capital expenditure. And one of

the things that they've floated is manufacturing their own GPUs. Now they're not saying that they're

going to start this tomorrow. But I do think the fact that they're even putting this on a pitch deck

tells you something really interesting. Right now we have this massive compute bottleneck. It's

very real. Every serious AI company right now is fighting for Nvidia chips. And the, you know,

the wait times and the prices are super, super brutal. SpaceX has a ton of in-house AI workloads.

They have Starlink. They have Starship avionics. They have autonomy. They have the entire

GROC project over XAI that shares their infrastructure. So they have a ton of demand. And honestly,

I think this is what is what this is telling us right now is that we've basically reached the

point where the biggest tech companies in the world no longer trust the GPU supply chain enough

to just be customers. Meta is already doing custom silicon. Jill Google has TPUs. Amazon has

training. Apple is building their own inference chips. And I think SpaceX is basically joining that

because they see the need. This makes a lot of sense to me. Whether they pull it off or not

is definitely a different question. Chipfabs are very hard. Elon's plate is already very full.

But I think the very, the direction is pretty clear. The compute side of AI is becoming just as

competitive as the model side. Microsoft has just announced that they are integrating advanced models

including, by the way, what they're calling Anthropics Cloud Mythos preview. So Mythos from

Cloud is kind of this huge cyber security AI model that can find bugs and anything. And it's got

like all of these different issues and they're concerned that it could be used by hackers. All of

that right? Well, Microsoft is actually integrating that. But it's just a preview. It's directly

inside of their secure coding framework. And the idea is that Cloud gets used for threat detection,

vulnerability scanning, and incident response inside of Microsoft's dev tooling. And at the same time,

opening eye has been briefing US federal agencies, state governments, and also the five

eyes intelligence partners on a version of their model called GPT 5.5 cyber. Now, I don't want

to be skeptical, but it just feels so much like opening eyes trying to take on to what Anthropic

did with the kind of the Mythos type where there was like, oh my gosh, the model's so crazy and

it'd go like debrief the government and like the government had all this beef with Anthropic. But

now they're like talking to Anthropic because they have this super hardcore model that could like,

you know, wreck all the code bases in the world. So anyways, huge PR for Anthropic. They're stock

rows. They're like credibility. Everyone's a view of them. Definitely got a massive boost. And

it feels like opening eyes trying to just like tack on to that. Like, oh, look, we got a really good

cyber model too. And so anyways, whatever, I'm not saying it's probably not just as capable,

but it does feel like a lot of this is marketing kind of ploy vibes. But anyways,

opening eye held a Washington event for about 50 cyber defense practitioners. So they're

obviously putting a lot of energy into this. Okay, Google just had their big cloud event in Las Vegas

this week. They rolled out the Gemini Enterprise agent platform. I think this is basically their

attempt to take a swing opening eye in Anthropic in the enterprise for the AI agent race. I think

first access to over 200 models through model Garden is something that they're going to be rolling

out. So enterprises aren't going to be locked into just Gemini. The second thing is that they

launched Gemini 3.1 pro Gemini 3.1 flash image, a brand new music model called Luria 3. They launched

Gemini for on the opens or Gemma for on the open source side. And they also built a whole

management layer. So a shared inbox where AI agents post progress updates handoff tasks coordinate

with humans. This is interesting because they're building a lot of this infrastructure for the agents

to actually go and accomplish tax and do it well. In my opinion, Google has had the research and

infrastructure forever. But what they've looked kind of not so not so good at on the agent side

is actually pulling it off in a meaningful way for enterprises. And so because of that, we have

this open AI had their huge release. And then we've had Anthropics Cloud co work in the past that

has swept up a lot of enterprise customers and unfortunate 500 buyers. It looks like we're going

to have more competition in that space now. Next up, Meta has just sent a memo to all of their

employees announcing that they're cutting about 10% of their workforce. This represents about

8,000 people. Their cuts are going to all roll out on May 20th. They're also scrapping a bunch

of plans to hire for 6,000 open roles. So total, the reduction in headcount is closer to about

1,400 positions if you're looking at kind of the unfilled ones. And the reason that they're giving

for this over at Meta is AI Zuckerberg basically told everyone this at the start of the year when he

said 2026 would be quote, the year AI starts to dramatically change the way we work. Now,

you know, that could be a really positive thing. A lot of people see this as sort of an ominous

thing. But here we are regardless. Meta's 2026 capex guidance is 115 to 135 billion. This is up

massively from 72 billion last year. So they're spending way more on AI infrastructure and they're

going to be cutting back on people. So spending more for the AI models and less on the actual people

running it. I think on the exact same day, we also have Microsoft that has announced that they

also are doing not really layoffs. They're trying to avoid I think the word layoffs. But it is

the it's what they're calling the first quote voluntary retirement bioprogram. This is the first

time that the company has ever done this in their 51 year history. According to CNBC and Bloomberg,

this offer applies to any employees whose age plus the years that they've been there total 70 or

more. So for example, if there's like a 52 year old who's been working at Microsoft for 18 years,

they would qualify for this. And the company has about 120,000 employees with this the bio could reach

potentially 7% of that, which is about 8,750 people. That's on top of the 9,000 layoffs that they

did last summer. So with all of this, Microsoft is obviously trying to cut down their head count.

They're trying to do it right now in a bit of a less abrasive way than kind of a mass layoffs.

But the direction is is basically the same way. And if you also add into that snapchat,

just cut a thousand jobs, which was 16% of their workforce. And a week ago, for the exact same

reason, and their CEO set a on now generates over 65% of their code. So with all of that, I know

it sounds like, I don't know, it could be like scary. It could be bad news. What I what I do think

that is interesting here is that we're kind of watching the first real wave of AI driven white

collar restructuring in a lot of the biggest tech companies. You know, this isn't kind of like the AI

is going to take your job someday. I think today we're seeing a lot of these shifts happen. But I do

think an important story here is that people that are deeply embedded and skilled with AI and

using it to leverage their roles better are the ones that are actually being held onto. And I think

this is an important part. Companies are able to do more with less people due to AI. So if you are

someone inside of your organization that is, you know, taking full advantage and becoming the most

productive as possible, I don't think you have anything to fear truly. Not just because maybe you

wouldn't get laid off, because even if you did, it will be easy for you to find something else.

If you are really an expert using your tools, these AI tools for your expertise. So that is that's

kind of, I mean, this is just the world. So I'm trying to say, you know, I'm trying to tell it

like it is. This is kind of the world we live in. But I think that the people that are really

taking advantage of these AI tools are the ones that are going to be successful going forward. And

if you're, you know, newsflash, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably in that top

bubble, that top tier that's taking all of this very seriously. Okay, let's get into the big story

today, which is a GPT-5 just got released yesterday. And this is a big moment for a bunch of

different reasons. First, I think speed GPT-5.4 for drop just six weeks ago. So six weeks later,

we have an absolutely new model. The cadence is really fast on how they're pushing this out.

And I think this tells you a lot about the pressure that OpenAI is under right now. They have

pressure both from Anthropic and Google. There's the two people, I think, that are pushing them

the hardest. Anthropic just hit a $30 billion, you know, annualized revenue run rate. And Google

just shipped their enterprise agent platform. OpenAI doesn't really get to take any quarters off

anymore. Right now, they have to be shipping aggressively if they're going to keep up with Anthropic.

And one like, I guess, story that I think is really important on why this is so critical for them.

This is kind of interesting. I actually don't see a lot of people reporting on this.

But there is the secondary's market where employees are able to sell their shares in an

organization on like a secondary market. And there's a bunch of like regulation and tricky stuff

with that. But that's kind of the basis of what happens there. On the secondaries, OpenAI's

valuation, what people are buying the shares for right now, it's kind of interesting because it's

like an indicator of kind of where the stock will go sometimes. But anyways, what OpenAI's shares

are selling for right now is $850 billion. That's the valuation if you want to go buy OpenAI shares.

Anthropic shares, one trillion. So Anthropic is being priced and valued at higher possible,

you know, possible part of that is maybe not even where they are today, but where people can see

them going in the future. All of that, I think, is giving OpenAI, who's about to IPO. And Anthropic

is probably about to IPO. They're giving them kind of a really big moment where they need to make

a massive push because they don't want, you know, they don't want IPO and Anthropic. This company

has raised way less money that has way less users. All of a sudden is valued higher in their stock

rips more. OpenAI really wants to avoid that. So that is what they're trying to fight here with

GPT 5.5. So the model itself, basically, OpenAI's positioning on this is that it is quote-unquote

fully agentic model, meaning that it's designed to complete all these multi-step computer tasks

with minimal human direction. They specifically highlighted five different categories,

analyzing data, writing and debugging code, operating software directly, researching online,

creating documents and spreadsheets autonomously. So this is like, they're giving us all a pitch on

how to use this inside of work, which is what's interesting to me because their audience of 900

million weekly active users is, I mean, it's just kind of everyday people, but they're really

putting a big push here into enterprise because Anthropic has just crushed it in that area so much.

As far as the benchmarks go, it's got 88.7% on the SWE bench, it's got 92.4% on the MMLU,

it's got 82% on the terminal bench. It's doing really good. They also claim that it has a 60% drop

in hallucinations versus GPT 5.4, which it kind of holds up as what we used to be the greatest

and now they're saying, look, it's getting better at this. The pricing, I think, is also where this

gets very interesting. The standard GPT 5.5 is $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million

output tokens. That doubles GPT 5.4 on paper, but OpenAI is claiming that the model uses tokens

more efficiently so the real world cost per task should be roughly flat or better, right? So

this is interesting. They're saying, look, it's, you know, for the output, for the tokens,

for the words that it gives you, it's twice as expensive, but because it's so efficient with

its tokens, technically, it can get a lot more done for a lot less. So it's about the same cost.

That's really, really interesting. GPT 5.5 Pro is $30 in and $180 out, which is very expensive.

It's more than clothed Opus. So OpenAI is, you know, obviously saying, if you want the premium

tier, you have to pay the premium prices. They're also betting on enterprise customers doing this.

Rollout is they have pro, plus, and business, and enterprise users inside of CHI GPD that are all

getting it. I've been playing around with it and generating some reports with it, and it's

pretty good if I'm being honest, but I will say I also noticed that right at the bottom of my,

you know, response, it's like, hey, do you want an even better response to this? Try upgrading to

GPT 5.5 Pro. And I click that and it's like $100 a month subscription that is trying to get me to.

So I think just like anthropic, they're realizing that they need to, for power users, they need to

try to push them towards paying more for getting better results now. It's kind of tricky because

within anthropic, it's kind of like token based, right? It's like, look, you want more tokens,

like you ran out of tokens for your hour allotment, upgrade to get more. And that's something that I

pay for around I pay the $200 a month anthropic thing. But for the OpenAI, when it's just like,

get better responses, it feels like I'm like, well, it's just like paywalling the best responses.

I don't like that as much as like, look, we're giving you the best, but it just burns your tokens

really fast. So if you want more tokens, that that's a pitch I actually like better. So I'm curious

to see where that goes. The API is quote unquote, coming very soon, but it's not out yet because I

have to put more safeguards on it, which I'm bummed about. I always love the APIs coming out,

obviously, because I'm also adding those to my platform AI box. So anyways, I think there is

so much going on right now as far as infrastructure, the labor market, the capability curve, all of this

are moving very quickly. GPT 5.5 is I think kind of the most visible piece we're seeing this week,

but all of the stuff is working together that we've talked about on the show, and it's going to be

interesting to see some of the shifts in the industry. Okay, that's it for the show today. If you've

been enjoying the podcast, it would be a huge favor to me if you could leave a rating and review

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grateful if you could do that. And also make sure to go check out AIbox.ai. There is a link in the

description. I appreciate you listening and I'll catch you in the next one.