Is Google back?

They claim that they are back. Gemini 4 Argon is rolling out, with competitive frontier-level benchmarks, at $2/$10.

What we don’t have is access to the model, because Google Fails Marketing Forever. So it is far too early to say what we have here. When I know more, so will you.

OpenAI was forced to pull what would have been GPT-6.1 Astra due to alignment failures. They did offer us GPT-6.1 Sol, which is pitched as approaching Astra quality at the much lower price of $2/$10, the same as Gemini 4 Argon.

The rest of OpenAI’s big Dev Day announcements were Ultrafast mode and Dots, your always-on AI agent based on Astra, which comes with your Pro subscription. I’m trying it out and will report back over time if I find it useful.

The new hotness remains Claude Opus 5.5. This model rocks. It has made me considerably more productive and made my day more pleasant. It should raise your ambitions. There are some particular reasons to call upon Fable 5.1 or Astra, and sometimes a cheaper model will do, but pending Argon I consider Opus 5.5 my favorite model by a wide margin.

Politics continues. The White House hosted a lunch with the major tech leaders, and everyone signed a ‘morally binding’ White House accord on AI Safety. This gave the labs the go ahead to meet and agree on safety standards, and also called upon them to complete the Quest for Embedded Evaluators.

Jensen Huang went on the Ezra Klein Podcast, in a conversation worthy of full analysis. Jensen Huang has many deeply unpopular positions, and also expressed many things that are not true, some of which he seems to sincerely believe. Most importantly he thinks of safety and alignment and everything else in AI as engineering problems, which is why he expects the labs to solve the problems. Whereas if the labs can’t solve the problems, suddenly Huang turns into a safety hawk, because he is used to chips where your product has to be safe and work every time.

Tomorrow’s post will cover political developments and the further progress of the preference cascade on AI safety. This includes continued shifts in popular opinion, Congressional hearings, various attempts by the usual suspects to go after anyone and anything that cares about AI safety, and following the money.

Tomorrow I am also going to The Curve, a conference at Lighthaven in Berkeley, arriving Friday afternoon and leaving Monday morning. I am potentially available for high-value meetings with others while I am there, but will have my hands full at the conference.

As usual, I do not write while on trips, and my coverage of breaking news will be on pause until Tuesday. I may or may not queue up some other things in the meantime.

Table of Contents

- Language Models Offer Mundane Utility.

- Huh, Upgrades. Google announces Gemini 4 Argon.

- Better Call Sol. Introducing GPT-6.1 Sol.

- Gotta Go Ultrafast. It will cost you, but speed kills.

- On Your Marks. A sudden lack of cheating on DroneBench.

- Choose Your Fighter. OpenAI adjusts its subscription tiers, cuts some rate limits.

- Get My Agent On The Line. Muse is never going to not look sinister, for reasons.

- The Warner Sister. Dot. They lock us in the sandbox whenever we get caught.

- Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Remarkable attitudes towards AI writing.

- Fun With Media Generation. The latest iteration towards viable AI longform.

- Cyber Lack of Security. Anthropic on the cyber capabilities of GLM-5.3.

- A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Latest warning about is our children learning.

- They Took Our Jobs. The inevitable rise of the robots.

- Levels of Friction. Hospitals use AI to do aggressive upcoding.

- Get Involved. New book, cool venue, and a word of warning.

- Introducing. The Nvidia Open Agents Safety Platform.

- In Other AI News. White House is actively cutting off UK AISI.

- Show Me the Money. Anthropic IPO prospectus has leaked.

- Quickly, There’s No Time. AI is getting cheaper at an unprecedented rate.

- Pick Up the Phone. The results from the US-China summit.

- Quest for Sane Regulations. California mandates gene synthesis guardrails.

- Chip City. Google is testing putting TPUs IN SPACE.

- The Open Model Frontier Is Largely Massive Fraudulent Distillation Attacks.

- The Week in Audio. SNL, Gleave and Habryka, 80k hours, Odd Lots, Hillary.

- People Just Say Things.

- Rhetorical Innovation. Kind words. Thanks, everyone.

- Greetings From the Department of War. Anthropic somehow loses a court ruling.

- The Department of Autonomous Warfare. They’re going to the moon.

- Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Persona selection.

- Cooperative Alignment. The coming Woke-style battles over AI’s status.

- I’m Upping My p(doom), the Future Goes Foom. Not so fast, they say.

- No, You Make a Good Point, You’re Not That Persuasive. Hmm.

- Muddling Through. People are highly suspicious of plans so here we are.

- The Lighter Side. Peak performance.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

America.gov has been introduced, please welcome your new government chatbot for all your dealing-with-the-government needs. There is big talk about what it will be able to do in the future, such as let you apply for a passport fully online or change your last name after marriage with a single form, all of which would be great.

For now, that’s all a demo. There’s no reason we can’t do that. There’s no reason we couldn’t have done it 20 years ago. The second best time to implement it is right now.

The underlying models are Gemini and Grok, and the bot will typically answer historical questions but start refusing if you ask about recent international events or otherwise go too far off topic.

If Gemini is the base, then perhaps America.gov will get a lot better soon, given what we see now expect from Gemini 4 Argon.

Answer why Taleb despises Tetlock, to the satisfaction of Taleb. Answer seems good. Reason number five is ‘Covid as the test case’ where Taleb and allies correctly say superforecasters missed badly, underestimating spread. Whereas the rationalist community’s forecasters know exponentials better and did not make that mistake.

Physicist Matt von Hippel dared the AI labs to impress him by doing N=4 super Yang-Mills to nine loops. Several Anthropic employees read his blog, so they did it, with Fable 5.1 and about $100 in credits with prompts like ‘keep going,’ and at the same time by coincidence a different team led by Song He did it with some help from Astra.

Carter Church uses Astra to one-shot break an unsolved Napoleonic cipher.

Patrick McKenzie confirms he is capturing a lot of mundane utility.

No, seriously, quite a lot of utility:

Patrick McKenzie: Sometime in the last ~two model releases from the big labs they went from “this would be acceptable output from the median low-seniority coworker” to “this is frighteningly good.”

I think people who are not daily users of the models are unlikely to grok that, so, saying it.

There are a couple of very niche subfields where I reasonably think I’m top 5-100 in the world and on at least one occasion for both models, with regards to one of those subfields, a relatively anodyne prompt got back three bullet points that would have been a good day for me.

Both in the sense of “That would have taken me a day of labor to generate successfully” and “Contingent on spending the day in that fashion, that would be at the upper end of the range of my professional outputs which take a day to produce.”

“You are being a bit vague here.”

Look, point them at hard problems where you are a good judge of success. Or don’t, and be very surprised as they start eating hard problems in a wide range of contexts.

“Are you worried here?”

Not exactly my emotional valence but if you had asked me two years ago when I expected present capabilities I would have said “Hmm, 2029? 2030? Possible we asymptote on current approaches before then; tough for me to underwrite.”

Huh, Upgrades

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