AI #166: Google Sells Out

This was the week of GPT-5.5. It is an excellent model, sir, and OpenAI is competitive with Anthropic’s top public offering for the first time since late last year. As usual, I did coverage of the System Card, and then of Capabilities and Reactions. DeepSeek gave us the long-awaited v4. DeepSeek has given us another strong feat of engineering efficiency for 1M context. That is impressive, and there will be those who build upon v4 and put it to good use. But this is not a frontier model, nor a DeepSeek moment, nor a key step to proto-AGI or anything like that. Compute constraints bind, and have forced DeepSeek to focus on efficiency. Let us keep it that way. Talkie is the other release, an old timey AI trained on text from before 1931. Fun stuff. Google signed a contract with the Department of War that not only agrees to ‘all lawful use’ with no functional exceptions whatsoever, it also agreed to modify or remove any safety barriers upon request. They did this under no deadline or…