AI #176 Part 1: Doing It Live

Enough things added up that this week is getting split into two parts. Then on Monday, if all goes as I expect, we’ll cover OpenAI’s Sol, aka GPT-5.6. OpenAI also gave us an upgraded voice mode, which I haven’t tried out but early reports are that it is a step change. AI writing, especially Claude writing, is becoming more prominent and harder not to notice, and increasingly a tough read when encountered in the wild. Does anyone care? Or are those who care the weird ones here? This week saw an excellent paper, which I cover in No Space Like J-Space. Technically we also got Grok 4.5. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. A whole new world. Language Models Gain Unexpected Affordances. Wait, you can just do that? Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Things get old. Pay The Man His Money. You have a few more days with marginally free Fable. Huh, Upgrades. Anthropic raises API platform limits. Grok 4.5 Exists. It might be okay for its price. F*** It We’re Doing…