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GPT-5.5 Beat Mythos. The Race Got Weirder.

Apr 28, 2026 · 49 min

EP 03Apr 28, 2026 · 49 minStack Check

On April 23, 2026, OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5, the model previously known as Spud. The same day, VentureBeat clocked it narrowly beating Anthropic's gated Claude Mythos Preview on Terminal-Bench 2.0. The day after, DeepSeek released V4, a 1.6 trillion parameter open-source model running natively on Huawei chips, at one-sixth the inference cost of the closed frontier. And Google announced it would invest up to forty billion dollars in Anthropic.

Two weeks ago we called GPT-5.5 noise. Now it's the lead story. The frontier is moving every six weeks, the cloud war is inside the labs, and the open-source ceiling jumped a tier on hardware your security team can't audit.

That's the cold open. From there, Oscar and Matt spend 49 minutes doing what this show does: filter the week's AI noise, review the tools they actually use, and close with two hot takes you won't hear anywhere else.

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Signal or Noise

The week’s AI headlines, filtered.

  1. SIGNALGPT-5.5 (Spud) ships

    The first buyable frontier model to beat a gated frontier model on a public benchmark. Same week as the Google–Anthropic announcement. The two-tier story from Episode 2 just collided with the cadence story Fortune was writing all month.

  2. SIGNALDeepSeek V4

    1.6T total parameters, 1M context, MIT license, native on Huawei Ascend 950PR. The open-weights ceiling moved by a tier. Geopolitics moved into the model card.

  3. SIGNALGoogle + Anthropic, up to $40B

    Google has Gemini in-house and is still writing a forty billion dollar check. That tells you what they actually believe about the next 18 months.

  4. SIGNALCognition at $25B

    Devin-in-Windsurf is the first time the agent and the IDE feel like one product, not two stitched together. Whether the price tag holds is a different question.

  5. NOISEGrok 4.3 Beta at $300/month

    Video and slide generation, no cross-session memory. The price tag is the message.

Stack Check

Four tools we actually use.

Vercel Labs Agent Browser

Browser automation CLI built for agents. Persistent sessions, headless or real Chrome with your profile, annotated screenshots so a model can click “label 7” instead of guessing CSS selectors.

WorkOS (FGA + AuthKit)

The auth and permissions layer for agent surfaces. Sub-50ms p95 authorization checks. AI Installer in the CLI sets up auth in under five minutes. Last week's Vercel breach was a permissions story with a price tag attached.

AI SDK (ai-sdk.dev)

Define the agent once, swap the model in one line. The Gateway added GPT-5.5, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, and GPT Image 2 inside two weeks. The only honest way to evaluate this week's launches on real workloads.

Claude Code /remote-control

Run claude remote-control on your laptop, approve file changes from your phone, walk to lunch. Work stays local. The walkaway-and-approve workflow is the productivity win of the quarter.

Hot takes

Two opinions, no disclaimers.

Oscar

“Open-source AI just won the cost war and lost the trust war in the same week. DeepSeek V4 is the best open weights anyone has ever shipped. It also runs on chips your security team can't audit.”

Matt

“OpenAI shipping GPT-5.5 two weeks after GPT-5.4 is the end of the model launch as a marketing event. From now on, the model layer is a software update, and the only thing that matters is what you ship on top of it.”

Sources referenced