big milestone!
Design Arena: BREAKING - OFFICIAL RESULTS: GPT-5.6 Sol by @OpenAI is 1st overall on Design Arena with an Elo of 1353.
This puts GPT-5.6 Sol above Claude Fable 5 by @AnthropicAI and in the same performance band as GLM 5.2 by @Zai_org on frontend design.
This is an 18-position and 60-point Elo
Kane 謝凱堯
All the data for https://rokhanna.money is available for download. It includes:
127 PDFs of @RoKhanna's paper disclosures
4,057 scans and JSON files
23,099 assets
48,281 transactions
https://github.com/kanetronv2/khanna-disclosure-explorer
Kane 謝凱堯: All of Congressman’s @RoKhanna’s financial disclosures are finally OCR’d and searchable online
He hand-filed papers instead of using the electronic system to obfuscate the data, but I indexed them all here:
https://rokhanna.money
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
This story about the leftist consultants who discovered Graham Platner is full of absolutely wild tidbits
Joshua Achiam
A couple of thoughts: generally I think it's fair game for media to be critical, and you can't/shouldn't rely on friendly coverage in exchange for an exclusive. In an exclusive you get to say your piece, but then it's really out of your hands. However, I do think it's fair to expect that some standards of decorum or objectivity are at play. WIRED failed to live up to those expectations of journalism in this case and instead produced something Really Goddamn Weird.
The article title and subtitle should never have gone out. "Freaky," "soft," "oddly intimate" and the faint whiff of judgement in the phrase "some very tactile hands" are all deliberate choices that pick a sexualized lens for reporting on the tech. The original version of the article, since modified, included the quite extraordinary remark: "This starts to get weird because, if the advertising for the Neo is anything to go by, 1X seems pretty sure that you’re also going to want to have sex with its robot." The words "kink shame" appear in the article.
This barely qualifies as tech reporting. This is catty and bizarre. Whatever editorial standards allow this kind of thing are hard to fathom. Pushback is fully justified. There should be a real distinction between what a news outlet publishes and social media dunkslop.
dar: I gave WIRED the exclusive on our hands launch, and they wrote a really weird article about how we are sexualizing robotics…
https://www.wired.com/story/the-1x-neo-robot-has-freaky-fast-fingers/
I felt pretty betrayed because that’s not what they told me they were writing about not is that what I’ve ever been about…
Vinod Khosla
How about a California initiative that allows for minimal restrictions and no zoning restrictions other than meeting the basic state building code on any housing that’s targeted at the lowest quartile of housing prices in the county. Works for every county in the state. Short time, construction and lower cost at the low end. Will increase supply at the low end of prices.
Garry Tan: They’re going to blame tech
But the real cause: extreme restriction of housing supply and subsidized demand
Jonathan Lacoste
Building is a choice, SF should embrace it
Austin delivered 73k new apartment units the past 3 years alone
The result: vacancy rates at 13% and rents down 16%
I regularly meet new founders moving to Austin — cost of building a company & living are the main drivers
Garry Tan: They’re going to blame tech
But the real cause: extreme restriction of housing supply and subsidized demand
Lee Kuan Yimby
This is the 23 year old DSA Councilwoman Ayah A. Al-Zubi in Cambridge who proposed getting rid of shot spotter along with Burhan Azeem. Cost this man his life a month later.
Swann Marcus: Cambridge disabled Shot Spotter because they said it was racist. Then a black Public Works employee got shot, lay undiscovered for over an hour while bleeding out in a public park, and died because first responders didn't know a shooting happened
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/cambridge-shooting-death-shotspotter-city-council/
Jared Friedman
This is the playbook for how we rebuild America's industrial power.
Zane Hengsperger: http://x.com/i/article/2076321621787181056
ChatGPT Work is so good, very proud of the team and excited for people to explore what’s possible
Victor E. Nunez: a lot of people haven’t realized how much more capable Chat has become in the last few days
how much of Codex is now available directly inside @ChatGPTapp on mobile and the web.
the Codex desktop app is great. I obviously live there.
but now, inside ChatGPT, you can tap Work
Seeing this quite often today.
My wild guess is 90%+ of people are using GPT 5.6 Sol and <10% are using Terra or Luna.
Peter Yang: Literally the first time I see GPT do this (it's for Sol)
good use case!
Pauline P. Narvas: Use @ChatGPTapp Work for your most important tasks ⚽️
Craven politicians who disable public safety technology for virtue signal and culture war purposes will always get blood on their hands
Swann Marcus: Cambridge disabled Shot Spotter because they said it was racist. Then a black Public Works employee got shot, lay undiscovered for over an hour while bleeding out in a public park, and died because first responders didn't know a shooting happened
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/cambridge-shooting-death-shotspotter-city-council/
Paul Graham
Robert Scoble interviews me outside YC after the summer 2010 Demo Day. By that point we'd funded what seemed the enormous number of 208 startups, including 36 in that batch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UacbJ72dluU&t=12s
Era of the Gentleman Scientist is so back
Chayanka_42: We are entering a completely new era of science
Here is Yuji Tachikawa from Japan (Mathematical Physics, String Theory, QFT) on recent progress in his own work using Fable 5 :
"I've been trying out Claude Fable recently, and last night, on a whim, I showed it my research
Little Tech Association
Today we're launching the Little Tech Association (#LTA), the actual voice of founders, startups, and investors striving to grow and compete in the digital economy.
200+ member companies, from names you know to ones you haven't heard of yet: @protonprivacy, @Replit, @Yelp, @ycombinator and many more.
One shared belief: the best products and ideas should win on merit, not market power.
https://littletech.org/
Steve Rattner
Oil prices are up nearly $4.50 since Trump scrapped the MoU with Iran.
Without a deal, the market is pricing in elevated oil prices through 2030. The margin of increase will likely go up if there is no progress on negotiations in the coming weeks.
Peter Yang
My top 5 takeaways from @imjaredz (Builder in Residence at @Cognition):
1. Use cloud agents for async and parallel work.
A cloud agent runs on a remote computer with its own repo, terminal, and browser. It keeps working when you close your laptop and lets you run many agents without overloading your local machine. This is what makes agent fan-out practical.
2. Use a main agent to manage the agent team.
Ask it to divide a large job into independent slices, write the prompts, launch the sub-agents, and combine their results. Jared demoed using this pattern to generate 10 competing landing-page designs.
3. Keep each sub-agent’s context small and its task focused.
Agents work better when they can focus on one problem without a crowded context window. Scan the dependencies first, then give each sub agent a slice it can test and merge independently.
4. Have the main agent check each sub-agent’s work before you do.
It can ask the sub-agents to run tests, attach screenshots, and return videos, then compare their results and prepare one report. This lets you review the evidence without jumping between 10 agent threads.
5. Keep the human focused on taste and high-level decisions.
The agent team can divide the work, execute it, test it, and bring the results back. The engineer still chooses the problem, judges the tradeoffs, and decides what ships.
📌 Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/0YeeJHYy-Vc
Peter Yang: "If you want to build great agents, you have to let the model cook."
Here’s my new episode with @imjaredz (Builder in Residence at @cognition), where he shared what he learned from watching the best engineers build with AI agents, including:
→ Why fewer rules make agents work
Whoa — fountain codes are really interesting!
Jeffrey Emanuel: This is all possible because of the genius of RaptorQ fountain codes (RFC 6330), which I've written about before here:
https://jeffreyemanuel.com/writing/raptorq
In RaptorQ, every file turns into a stream of symbols where any K (plus a small epsilon) of them reconstruct the original.
You can
you can just create things
Prasenjit: just asked gpt-5.6 sol in cursor to set up blender mcp and make me a realistic floating macbook, then render the whole thing.
never opened blender once in my life before today.
Codex for finding customers for your startup:
Kappaemme: CODEX SKILL THAT FINDS YOUR STARTUP’S FIRST CUSTOMERS!
I made a Codex skill that analyzes your startup and finds potential customers from real public signals.
Paste your startup URL while Codex defines your ideal customer, searches public discussions, qualifies each prospect,
Matt Stockton
The recent @latentspacepod talking about Modal w/ @akshat_b is fantastic. Modal is an amazing technology to use. It just works and it is extremely well designed. They 100% get dev ergonomics correct.
I use it for a lot of different things, and honestly use it for things that go 'against the grain' of their core positioning / offering. Turns out that works well too :)
Wrote a bit about how I am using their services here:
https://mattstockton.com/2026/07/12/how-i-use-modal.html
clarity is nice
Tibo: Rest assured that GPT 5.6 Sol will stay in the ChatGPT subscription you pay for. Including Go, Plus and Pro subscriptions. At least until we ship an even better model.
its been surreal to see @willccbb's career take off after getting unleashed on the world. PI (esp @asharoraa and @vincentweisser and @jackminong etc too many to name) are overlooked for having both incredible talent density and great execution. to this extent their crypto-adjacent vibes and aurafarming even works AGAINST them because you pattern match to people who -only- have vibes and nothing else. if this is intentional, it is kinda genius tbh
as someone who publicly (in our @jacobeffron pod) lost hope on RLaaS businesses over a year ago, PI, AC and friends have shown that the prevgen weren't wrong, just early/skill issue. both humbling and inspiring!
AI Engineer: Congrats to PI on the unicorn round and $100M ARR!
we were proud to have @willccbb introduce verifiers at the first AIE NYC a year ago and now... it is v1!
Will joins a rare list of three-time AIE speakers, and his talk on the full PI stack is linked below!
“Open-weight models ran 29% of gateway tokens, up from 11% in April”
Vercel: http://x.com/i/article/2076708586470707200
Anish Acharya
http://x.com/i/article/2076706424143650819
Tyler Bosmeny
YC has temporarily lost Tom to a startup with unusually high compute costs
Tom Blomfield: Personal update: I'm taking a leave of absence from YC to join Anthropic. I'll be working with @NotTomBrown on the compute team.
Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement,
Will Manidis
right on schedule
Will Manidis: http://x.com/i/article/2025280848187035648
Sol for web design:
Ahmed: GPT 5.6 Sol is Insane for web designers!
Prompt ↓
By the end of the year we should have:
GPT 6
Fable 5.5
Gemini 3.5 Pro
Grok 5
Spark 2
Kimi 3
Minimax M3.5
GLM 6
DeepSeek v4.5
Mistral 4
Qwen 4
MiMo 3
Never in the history of LLMs has the frontier been so multipolar. The benefits to agent labs and agent orchestration / LLM council judges/sidekicking are ramping up. invest accordingly
Half the time when I work with AI I'm basically telling it to remove things.
Even the smartest models just add so much pointless stuff to docs, plans, etc.
we love our users
Tibo: Thank you to the 7M active users who are now using Codex and ChatGPT Work.
We have added a banked reset to everyone's account to celebrate the milestone. You can apply the reset in the desktop app or on web and it will replenish the weekly usage for you.
Have fun out there.
one of the most memorable cooking pods we've had - both in terms of the content and the food! high protein percentage in both.
Latent.Space: In this episode, @EngramLab co-founder and CEO @dan_biderman joins @allenpark to cook Mediterranean meatballs with yellow rice and talk about building AI that actually learns from you: why long context, RAG, and compaction eventually break down, how Engram compresses knowledge
AI Engineer
🆕 In Code They Act, In Proof We Trust — Erik Meijer
last year, @solomonstre defined agents as "an LLM that's wrecking its environment in a loop", and @simonw coined the Lethal Trifecta for agents, that remains unsolved.
our closing keynote @headinthebox introduces the main motivations behind Automind and the Universalis interpreter - agents that carry their own verifiable proof of safety! link to talk below
Erik Meijer: Forty-odd slides that weave four story lines together with subtle and not so subtle jokes featuring Dario, Daniella, Sam, the Pope, Bernie, Claude, .... and code samples in Lean and Dafny.
I guarantee that my AIE World's Fair talk [0] will be more fun than all those after
Phillips P. OBrien
New @wapo story today, the Trump family has secured about $3.2 billion in Pentagon contracts for firms which they are involved in. This is the tip of the iceberg in the largest corruption saga in US history.
Cerebras
Dominic Kundel (from @OpenAI) gives the inside scoop on where GPT-5.6-Sol gets magical: computer use.
Background browser tabs, app control, multi-agent fanout, and Codex verifying its own work all change when latency drops.
Join us in the Token Billionaires Lounge, presented by @cerebras and @aiDotEngineer. In conversation with @dkundel // @MilksandMatcha
that goes hard
Chuck McKinnon: @perrymetzger "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... [T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
--C.S. Lewis
sol for debugging laptop power issues:
vogel: gpt 5.6 sol story of the day:
i have a macbook connected and powered by a caldigit TS5
it kept reconnecting randomly and it was pissing me off, i told sol to investigate and it found out that it would disconnect when power heavy GPU loads and the caldigit couldn't supply
When a better AI model gets released, the first thing you should try is to REMOVE instructions.
From @imjaredz (Builder-in-Residence at Cognition):
"Let the model cook instead of trying to push it in certain directions.
You're going to need less scaffolding around your agent as the models get better."
📌 Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/0YeeJHYy-Vc
Peter Yang: "If you want to build great agents, you have to let the model cook."
Here’s my new episode with @imjaredz (Builder in Residence at @cognition), where he shared what he learned from watching the best engineers build with AI agents, including:
→ Why fewer rules make agents work
Andrew Reed
knew this was a good idea
Max Lugavere: Just telling people they slept poorly led to impaired cognitive function. Telling them they slept fine preserved it.
Getting realtime progress updates on my model training runs.
This feels like early vibe coding except it’s making personal models.
In the latest Codex/ChatGPT app, if you have some app authenticated in a Chrome tab, Codex won't be able to easily find it and will instead try to authenticate via the Codex browser instead.
Feels like a bug - it should be smart enough to know when you're already auth'ed in Chrome.
come for the best model, stay because we don’t treat you with contempt
Powerful building block for autonomous, self-optimizing websites and applications.
Give agents the ability to set up and tune experiments with feature flags.
Vercel Developers: You can now manage targeting rules for Vercel Flags with Vercel CLI.
𝚟𝚌 𝚏𝚕𝚊𝚐𝚜 𝚛𝚞𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝚊𝚍𝚍 𝚗𝚎𝚠-𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚌𝚔𝚘𝚞𝚝 \
--𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 "𝚞𝚜𝚎𝚛.𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚢:𝚒𝚗:𝙳𝙴,𝙴𝚂" \
--𝚟𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚗𝚎𝚠-𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚌𝚔𝚘𝚞𝚝
https://vercel.com/changelog/manage-vercel-flags-targeting-rules-from-the-cli
Garry Kasparov
Keep in mind that Trump‘s persistent delusion and propaganda that 2020 was stolen is essential pretext to his attempting to interfere in the midterms and 2028. He’s been laying that ground since the day he was reelected. Wake up.
Republicans against Trump: UPDATE: Donald Trump plans to claim in his speech that newly declassified intelligence reports reveal a foreign nation's plans to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, two White House officials told MS NOW
GPT-Live is a new level of experience:
Kevin Lee: New OpenAI GPT-live voice model feels light years ahead of the previous voice experience. Ran through a test exec coaching session during my morning workout and it was shockingly good. Listened intently, never cut me off, and responded within milliseconds.
Try out ChatGPT Sites, makes it way more fun to communicate things within a company:
jason: ChatGPT Sites is now in public beta.
You can turn a prompt, file, or rough idea into a dashboard, project tracker, report, prototype, or lightweight app:
build and edit directly in ChatGPT Work or Codex
test in a private preview publish and share with a URL
Rolling out across
Sol Ultra for solving Erdős problems:
Przemek Chojecki | PC: GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra found me a solution to another Erdos problem not long after this one.
Problem #793 asks about asymptotic of a 2-primitive set. GPT again came up with an extremely short and elegant construction that enhances original Erdos method used to prove a weaker result.
Something's wrong when people start making McKinsey 2x2 charts to try to understand what model and effort to use. Hope all of this can be simplified for regular users.
0xSero: GPT-5.6-Sol (medium) is the optimal configuration.
Peter Yang
Something's wrong when people start making McKinsey 2x2 charts to try to understand what model and effort to use. Hope all of this can be simplified for regular users.
0xSero: GPT-5.6-Sol (medium) is the optimal configuration.
ChatGPT Work has gotten less attention, but it's really cool. Love using it from my phone:
Haider.: i really like openai's new chatgpt "Work" feature
not everything involves programming, as sometimes you need help with project planning, content review, research, PDFs, or spreadsheets
so i'd summarize this:
need an answer? chat
need to code? codex
need to plan, research, or
where i'm currently at for Big Boy projects:
- sol ultra to plan
- fable 5 to critique
- sonnet 5/terra ultra/swe 1.7 to ultracode/slop cannon
- devin review to review (using kakuna)
~always use a variant of @mattpocockuk's grill-me or @trq212's interview-me to elicit decisions upfront
Thijs
i gave 5.6 sol access to my camera roll and had it extract pictures of every piece of clothing i own from my photos
then, told it to find new outfits for me and render them on me with gpt-image!
its kinda cool to see your entire wardrobe in a collection like this
Sam Altman: i'd love to see interesting things people have built with 5.6 sol.
i will send the person who made the coolest thing a special gift from the openai archives.
Geoffrey Litt
Video from my AIE talk is up!
Why it’s still important for humans to understand the code, and how to do that efficiently:
https://youtu.be/WkBPX-oDMnA
The two most popular http://eve.dev features so far have been:
1️⃣ The ease of use / filesystem API
2️⃣ Observability
We’re doubling down on both!
Vercel Developers: Agent Runs now shows subagent activity for @evedev_ projects.
Inspect each run in full, including turns, model and tool calls, cost, and token usage.
https://vercel.com/changelog/agent-runs-now-show-subagent-activity-on-eve-projects