What I Learned Testing GPT-5.5

GPT 5.5 a k a spud is here, but does it live up to expectations? This is one of the most hyped models we've had in a very long time, and we are gonna go through all of the first reactions, the benchmarks, and, of course, about a dozen of my own tests. 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. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitsy, Granola, and Mercury. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you wanna learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Now, a I daily brief dot a I is, of course, where you can find out about all the different things going on in our ecosystem. That includes things like the AI DB New Year's program, Clawcamp, etcetera. And to try to make things a little bit easier as we have some, perhaps, new free programs forthcoming, I'm actually launching an AI Daily Brief account system so that you can just sign up once and then add yourself to programs as they come up without having to sign up again each and every time. If you go to aidailybrief.ai right now, you can claim your username and be first in line to hear about another free program we have launching tomorrow on an operator's bonus episode. Well, friends, it is here. Ever since back in December, when OpenAI declared a code red, we knew that they were deep in the lab cooking something good, or at least we hoped it would be good. Certainly, the last few months have seen the company regain its verve, particularly around codecs, which has grown from just a couple 100,000 users at the beginning of the year to over 4,000,000 now. We've heard about the elimination of side quests, TVPN acquisition notwithstanding, and overall that focus has seemed to reshape the company. And ultimately, leaked memos and grand statements about focus don't matter a fig if it doesn't produce results. Now honestly, for OpenAI, the stakes heading into the 5.5 release had been increased dramatically because of their competition with Anthropic. Maybe the biggest story for the last few weeks in AI has been the model that we don't have in Anthropic's mythos. Anthropic basically said to the world, we've got a new powerful model that is a step change in capabilities, but it's too powerful right now for us to provide to the average user. Now, of course, in some cases, there has been skepticism that the power is the real reason that Anthropic isn't delivering this. Some have speculated that it has more to do with compute constraints than true cybersecurity concerns, but it has seemed like the limited set of partner companies that have had access have validated that it is indeed a very …