Opus 4.6 and ChatGPT 5.3-Codex Are Here and the Labs Are at War

Today on the AI Daily Brief, we've got not one but two new models that show exactly where the leading model labs priorities lie. And before that in the headlines, looks like we're gonna spend a cool 2 thirds of $1,000,000,000,000 on AI infrastructure this year. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. Firstly, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Scrunch, Superintelligent, and Blitsy. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe at Apple Podcasts. If you are interested in sponsoring the show or really wanna learn anything else about the show, you can head on over to a idailybrief.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with Google and Amazon rounding out big tech earnings with a very unified message, AI CapEx is accelerating faster than ever. Both companies lifted CapEx forecast significantly. Google guided AI spending between 175 and 185,000,000,000 for this year, vastly outstripping estimates of 115,000,000,000. This level would double Google's already high 91,000,000,000 in CapEx for 2025. Amazon though came in over the top the following evening guiding 200,000,000,000 in CapEx for 2026 for a 60% jump. With Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all lifting expectations, we now have 650,000,000,000 in projected AI CapEx for 2026 from just these four. That's now more than the inflation adjusted cost of the multi decade US interstate highway project anticipated to be spent in a single year. It's about two and a half Apollo moon missions or four and a half international space stations. Now on the actual earnings, there was a slight divergence in performance. Google reported annual revenue of 400,000,000,000 for the first time. They saw an 18% increase in overall revenue year over year and a 48% jump for their cloud division. Still, Google Cloud was a $17,700,000,000 business for the quarter, which puts them firmly in third place behind Microsoft Azure and AWS. At the same time, they recorded by far the fastest growth rate and were the only hyperscaler that increased their pace of growth. Amazon's story was slightly less positive. Net profit was 21,200,000,000.0 right in line with expectations. Top line revenue growth was 13.6% for a slight beat, reaching 213,400,000,000.0 for the quarter. AWS revenue growth was 24%, their fastest growth rate in three years, bringing division revenue to 35,600,000,000.0 for the quarter. While the numbers were fine, they didn't necessarily speak to massive monetization of AI bets, and CEO Andy Jassy spent much of the earnings call justifying the massive ramp up in CapEx. He told investors, I think this is an extraordinarily unusual opportunity to forever change the size of AWS and Amazon as a whole. We see this as an unusual opportunity, and we're going to invest aggressively to be the leader. Later …