When it was teased this morning, I didn’t expect GPT-5.5 to actually ship today. Sounds like it’s a very good, efficient model:

Across these domains, GPT‑5.5 is not just more intelligent; it is more efficient in how it works through problems, often reaching higher-quality outputs with fewer tokens and fewer retries. On Artificial Analysis’s Coding Index, GPT‑5.5 delivers state-of-the-art intelligence at half the cost of competitive frontier coding models.

And from Sam Altman, posting on the social network that just won’t go away despite how much we’d like it to:

We believe in democratization. We want people to be able to use lots of AI; we aim to have the most efficient models, the most efficient inference stack, and the most compute. We want our users to have access to the best technology and for everyone to have equal opportunity.

Sora also officially shuts down in a few days, freeing up those resources.

You can probably tell by my blog posts that I prefer OpenAI to Anthropic — more open, more affordable, less doomer — but I’ve gotta hand it to Anthropic for their focus. Doing fewer things, like just Claude Code and the new Claude Design, makes the products more approachable and easier to market. And last year, when OpenAI was doing too much, Anthropic was all-in on coding.

On the other hand, Claude’s product lineup isn’t named very creatively. Code, Design, and Cowork feel generic next to names like Codex, Pulse, and Atlas. The core design and personality of Claude helps make up for that. Claude is a friendly, less awkward name than ChatGPT.

There has been reporting of OpenAI consolidating all their user features into an “everything” super app. But what if that’s not ChatGPT, but actually Codex? The tricky part is they already have 900k weekly users using ChatGPT. If they do more with the Codex brand, it’s going to be a years-long transition.

Apparently the kids just call ChatGPT “Chat” anyway, though.

With Micro.blog, I like our approach where the Mac app has the core blogging features but also integrates private notes, book reading progress, and movie blogging. On mobile, those features are split into separate apps: Strata and Epilogue. It keeps each app focused, but it does make discovery more difficult for users. I’m working on a new branding web page to help with that.