Welcome, humans.

The model wars have officially entered their pay-per-view fight night era. A new r/ClaudeCode thread is already framing OpenAI’s Sol launch as a head-to-head fight with Anthropic’s Fable, complete with people threatening to move their $100/month subscription money, debating usage limits, and asking whether Anthropic now has to bundle Fable into paid plans.

Which is funny, because the “best model” debate used to be mostly benchmark charts and vibes. Now it’s becoming closer to picking a phone carrier: who gives you the most power, the fewest weird caps, and the least anxiety that your favorite feature disappears next week. Nothing says “future of intelligence” like a comment section doing SaaS contract negotiation in real time.

And the roster is about to get shuffled again. According to a new scoop, GPT-5.6 will be OpenAI's last release in the 5.x line, with GPT-6 landing in about a month (possibly even this month), built on a noticeably bigger pretrain than the ~4T "Spud" base under 5.5 and 5.6. The reported reason for the rush: OpenAI wants something that can actually go toe-to-toe with Fable 5 and the upcoming Fable 5.1, which is said to be deep in Anthropic's pipeline for a release in the coming weeks. DeepSeek isn't waiting around either, with an imminent V4 GA and a bigger model already in the works to challenge MiniMax's upcoming 2.7T Pro.

The real takeaway: the competition is actually starting to matter to users of both Claude and GPT.

If Sol pressures Anthropic to make Fable easier to access, or if Fable forces OpenAI to keep Sol inside subscriptions, users win.

If both companies respond by inventing 14 new quota systems and switch everything to nebulous “credits” (looking at you, Workspace Credits, what on Earth is even happening with this billing scheme??), we all lose and become amateur accountants trying to min-max our token usage to balance the budget…

*~Horrified realization stare ~* Oh God… is this how OpenAI pushes GPT Personal Finance on everyone?! Anyway, we’re going live later today @ 10am PT, 1pm ET to test them against each other. Come hang!

Here’s what happened in AI today:

• 😺 OpenAI got GPT-5.6 cleared for a broad rollout after extra Commerce Department testing, with Sol, Terra, and Luna set to launch Thursday.

• 📰 Meta launched Muse Image and previewed Muse Video, while Instagram reuse controls turned the launch into a privacy fight.

• 📰 OpenAI's Deployment Company agreed to buy Northslope, giving the lab more enterprise implementation muscle.

• 🍪 Claude Cowork hit web and mobile for Max users first, so remote agent sessions can keep running across devices.

• 📰 Prime Intellect raised $130M at a $1B valuation to help companies train their own agentic systems.

...and a whole lot more that you can read about here.

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🙀 OpenAI’s New ChatGPT Voice Can Finally Listen While It Talks

You know the awkward half-second where a voice assistant acts like a waiter who wrote down half your order and ran away? OpenAI is trying to kill that pause.

To do so, they introduced GPT-Live, the new voice system for ChatGPT Voice. The big change is full duplex, which means ChatGPT can listen and talk at the same time (watch the full livestream here).

Here's what happened:

• GPT-Live-1 is becoming the default Voice model for Go, Plus, and Pro users.

• Free users get GPT-Live-1 mini, while Business, Enterprise, and Edu do not get Live at launch.

• Live works on iOS, Android, and ChatGPT.com, but not yet in Temporary Chats, the desktop app, Work, Codex, or custom GPTs.

• GPT-Live is coming to the API soon. Current Realtime API pricing lists gpt-realtime-2.1 audio at $32 per 1M input tokens and $64 per 1M output tokens.

How to try it:

• Update ChatGPT on mobile or go to ChatGPT.com.

• Tap the Voice icon in the message bar.

• If prompted, allow microphone access.

• Open Settings → Voice to choose Live, Advanced, or Standard.

• Try: “Wait until I ask you to respond.”

Why this matters: Voice is becoming less like a novelty input method and more like an actual interface. The old version has been turn-based: you spoke, it waited, it answered, and sometimes it monologued like your uncle explaining airline miles. Live can interrupt, wait through pauses, use search and memory, show visual widgets, and hand harder questions to GPT-5.5 behind the scenes.

That changes the use cases. Voice gets much better for tutoring, interview prep, sales practice, brainstorming while walking, or translating while someone is still talking. Just being able to get live tutoring on your language fluency (let alone ANYTHING you do) is so impactful. Just watch this for example:

Also, if you want an unhinged use-case, try this one. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Our take: The one thing we’re left wondering is whether you can get ChatGPT to shut up. During the livestream, ChatGPT was listening to the conversation, and anytime there was a break, it offered an “mm,” “yeah,” or “that’s right.” That’s fine if you’re talking to it.

But if you want the AI to listen in a long, continuous meeting and only pipe up when you actually call on it, you do not want to hear its little mumbles and asides the whole time. That would drive us nuts. OpenAI says you can ask Live to wait until you’re ready, but long pauses or background speech may still cause it to respond. 

So we’ll try it ourselves on tomorrow’s live.

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🎓 AI Skill of the Day: Use AI to oustmart your competitors

The easiest AI trap is using it to go faster in the wrong direction. As Alex Hormozi told TBPN, too many entrepreneurs hear three podcasts, put on the orange glasses, and decide their dry cleaning store should become “the agent operating system for dry cleaners.”

Better move: use AI to make the business you already understand unfairly efficient.

Here’s the skill: stop thinking in org charts, and start thinking in workflows:

1. Pick one function your business does.

2. List the recurring workflows inside it.

3. Then ask which steps require human judgment and which steps AI can mostly handle.
   Hormozi’s example was an editor who used to touch six workflows, but now only needs to deeply handle three.

Use this prompt:

Act as an AI operations consultant for my business.

My business is: [describe business]
The function I want to improve is: [sales / marketing / ops / customer support / content / finance]
Here are the workflows this function handles: [paste list]

For each workflow:
1. Deeply interview me about exactly how I do each process.
2. Break the process into core steps.
2. Label each step as Human-only, AI-assisted, or AI-owned.
3. Explain why.
4. Identify the highest-ROI automation opportunity.
5. Warn me if this is a distraction, a meeting-summary trap, or a “rebuild Calendly for $9/month” mistake.
6. Suggest one narrow AI workflow I could test this week.

Here’s the key: your unique AI advantage starts with your data, not some random wrapper idea. If the task you are automating does not improve your money, margin, or output, it is probably just AI theater.

Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here. 

🍪 Treats to Try

*Asterisk = from our partners (only the first one!). Advertise to 700K+ readers here!

1. *Dell Pro Max with GB10 helps teams turn AI ideas into pilots, demos, and workflows with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell power and 128GB memory. See it here.

2. Claude Cowork keeps agent sessions running across desktop, web, and mobile so you can hand off work and come back later - included with Claude Max rn.

3. Cohere Transcribe Arabic gives developers an Arabic speech-recognition model with open weights and hosted API access - free/open-source.

4. Grok 4.5 is xAI's new flagship coding and office-work model, built with Cursor, and it's free to try in Grok Build for a limited time (paid only rn if you go the API route, $2/$6 per million tokens).

5. LemonLime plugs into your business tools and turns them into one shared brain your AI actually knows how to use (free 14-day trial, then $999/mo).

6. Framer's AI agent designs and edits your website live on the canvas, and you can trigger changes from Slack or GitHub too (free to try, paid plans start at $10/mo).

New from The Neuron: AI Explained - ComfyUI Proves AI Art Is Not Zero Effort.

Corey and Grant talked with Yannik Marek, co-founder and original creator of ComfyUI, about how the open-source, node-based workflow engine went from power-user playground to real production tool for images, video, VFX, games, and local AI workflows. Oh, and we touch on why ppl hate AI art, and his take on it is great.

Why Comfy matters: it moves visual AI from “type a prompt and pray” to a controllable production system. You can inspect the gears, chain models, reuse workflows, and make actual creative decisions instead of accepting the first roll of the dice. If you want to learn Comfy yourself, watch our intro to comfy for total beginners video.

Watch/listen now: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

📰 Around the Horn

• Microsoft is reportedly replacing some OpenAI and Anthropic model calls with in-house MAI models in Copilot apps such as Excel and Outlook.

• MiniMax is reportedly working on a 2.7T-parameter open-source model, which would add more pressure to closed frontier pricing.

• AI companies are racing toward custom chips, but fab, memory, and packaging bottlenecks still keep the supply chain tight.

• Meta is reportedly testing AI glasses that capture a wearer's surroundings with cameras and audio, pulling its hardware push into another privacy debate.

• Meta also previewed a detector for Muse-generated images and videos using invisible watermarks, though rate limits still apply.

• OpenAI agreed to buy Northslope for its Deployment Company, making enterprise rollout part of the GPT-5.6 day too.

• Gemini API Managed Agents now support background execution, remote MCP connections, and custom functions for longer-running developer agents - API pricing applies (docs).

• Anthropic committed $50B to new U.S. data centers, including custom facilities in Texas and New York built with Fluidstack, to keep up with growing Claude demand.

• Nvidia lost roughly $1T in market value in under two months, dragging its valuation back down to pre-AI-boom levels.

🧩 Thursday Trivia

You know the drill. One is AI, and one is real. Which is which? Vote in the poll below!

A. 

B.

A Cat’s Commentary

Trivia answer: A is AI (from Muse by Meta), and B is real (from Stardew Valley!) TBH with y’all tho, I almost went with this one.

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