Last week in AI: Opus 5, voice is actually good now, and big data centers

Hey there,

New models, new functionality — it's always a busy week. Let's get into it:

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5. Fable is a genius, but it's expensive. Opus 5 has remarkable benchmarks, and they kept the price the same as 4.7. And it's good at what really matters: Opus 5 is the new best model on RunescapeBench at its price point.
ChatGPT Voice is now in the desktop app and if you've felt burned by voice experiences, you need to give this a try. I played around with it and it's giving me strong "feel the AGI" vibes. OpenAI is commoditizing the computer OS and browser layers and wants to be your primary input for doing work. Go try it and multitask with a few different threads and ask it to use the browser to check your X feed.
WSJ reports NVIDIA is going to back OpenAI's 10 GW Ohio data center buildout. To start, these data center buildouts came out of cash flows. Then we transitioned to debt. And now that debt is more expensive, a way to de-risk the debt and get better rates is to have a major partner like NVIDIA backstop it. The circular revenues people will be loud on this one.

A few updates from me:

I ran Opus 5 through salesevals.com, and it didn't do well (32nd out of 62 model configs). In fact, GPT 5.6 Terra low did better at nearly 1/8th the cost. I'm working on new sales evals focused on email to see if the field is more level there. I tested the new Gemini models, but nothing to write home about there.
Build your agents, don't rent them. Jeff Huber wrote a great article called 12 Factor Companies that you should go read immediately. It's a quick read outlining how to build a firm that owns the leverage it gets from AI and builds it into the core of how it operates. I'm going to write more about "build don't rent" soon.

As for next week, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple all report earnings. The Kimi K3 weights should be available tomorrow if all goes according to plan, meaning many more inference provider options should be available soon.

LFG,

Drew

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