4:21 PM
Today in brief.
The AI 2027 team just published the sequel: AI 2040
Daniel Kokotajlo and the AI 2027 team - the group whose forecasting blog has been eerily accurate so far - released "AI 2040: Plan A," a proposal for how international superintelligence development could actually go right.
🤖 AI
Meta's coding model wants to compete with GPT-5.5 and Opus
Meta released Muse Spark 1.1, an agentic coding model on its new Model API, and early framing has it competitive with GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 - and it's scoring SOTA on HLE.
🤖 AI
Grok 4.5 landed and it's aimed straight at coding and agents
SpaceXAI's Grok 4.5 launched today, trained on NVIDIA's newest GB300 NVL72 systems and purpose-built for coding and agentic work - and early testers are already pointing it at real dev tasks with Cursor.
🤖 AI
OpenAI shipped the GPT-5.6 family, and it's already the default everywhere
OpenAI launched Sol, Terra, and Luna (GPT-5.6) plus a new autonomous agent called ChatGPT Work and a voice model called GPT-Live - and within a day it's Microsoft Copilot 365's 'preferred model' and Perplexity's default.
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🏛️ Policy
OpenAI's week of turbulence: a departure, a browser shutdown, and a lawsuit going sideways
Same week as the GPT-5.6 launch, OpenAI is dealing with its No. 2 stepping down for health reasons, quietly killing its AI browser, and a New York Times report claiming it hid evidence in the ChatGPT copyright trial.
💼 Business
AI is now a named reason in 31% of June's layoff announcements
Microsoft is cutting 4,800 jobs as it restructures around AI, and separately, AI was explicitly cited in 14,029 layoff announcements in June alone - about a third of the month's total.
💼 Business
Two fresh AI raises: a $1bn coding-agent bet and a Paris voice startup backed by Nvidia
Prime Intellect hit a $1bn valuation on a $130m Series A, and Paris-based voice-AI startup Gradium added $100M in seed funding with Nvidia among the backers.
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