Microsoft favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code by Tom Warren

It’s a tacit admission from Microsoft that the software maker is favoring Anthropic’s AI models over OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 models for coding and development. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s developer plans tell me that the company has been instructing its own developers to use Claude Sonnet 4 in recent months.

I have been in this boat myself. I was using Claude (Pro) this past month.

I am mostly happy with it. I was about to buy yearly subscription for it, there are same savings to it.

But then, OpenAI updated codex with a new release optimised for coding. And so I thought, before pulling the trigger and subscribing for a year let me give ChatGPT a go as well for a month.

Also, I am missing cursor agents. And codex does have agents. That might prove to be useful.

Should AI flatter us, fix us, or just inform us? by James O'Donnell

Should ChatGPT flatter us, at the risk of fueling delusions that can spiral out of hand? Or fix us, which requires us to believe AI can be a therapist despite the evidence to the contrary? Or should it inform us with cold, to-the-point responses that may leave users bored and less likely to stay engaged?

What is ChatGPT Go? | OpenAI Help Center by

ChatGPT Go is a new, low-cost subscription plan that provides expanded access to ChatGPT’s most popular features at an affordable price.

No Limit for Better by Kevin Kelly

Pricing abundance is tricky. Netflix, Spotify, and millions of software apps are offered at a fixed price for unlimited use. That works — they make money — because in fact, there is not unlimited use of them. We get satiated pretty quickly. We only watch so many hours, listen for limited hours, or eventually stop scrolling. This may not be true of AI. It looks like the demand for AI can exceed our own bounded time.

AI is not going to be rolled-back. The big companies will continue to subsidise it, hoping they can make money eventually. The platform companies (MSFT/AWS/Google) are at present. Others may, later.

But how do you price it?

There will always be people who abuse the limits. Pricing per use would make sense, but people don’t like paying like that. They like a fixed cost.

The second thing is subscriptions subsidise heavier users. Not everybody who subscribes to 20$ per month will be using that much. Like how gym memberships work. The real question is this - is 20$ too less for even normal users.

I think OpenAI’s move to ChatGPT is a step in that direction. This would allow them to control cost a bit. Which we may not like, but is required for it to be a sustainable business.

OpenAI launched its new GPT-5 series models yesterday.

The main thing is (as Sam Altman had foreshadowed) some time back that there is no model picker. GPT decides what model to use based on a bunch of factors.

Simon Wilson has a nice write up about the model here. I personally have just started using it. I think I prefer Claude, personally, but your mileage may vary.

And now for a little story. Copilot was one of the first products that I was using - mainly because it had generous free tier limits. But I got frustrated with it soon enough. It just did not give me good enough answers, and I had no way to select or know what model was giving the answer.

So now you know how I feel about them removing the model picker.

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There have been two sets of reviews I have read about ChatGPT.

The first set really like it. Like this review by Ethan Mollick

I asked GPT-5 Thinking (I trust the less powerful GPT-5 models much less) “generate 10 startup ideas for a former business school entrepreneurship professor to launch, pick the best according to some rubric, figure out what I need to do to win, do it.” I got the business idea I asked for. I also got a whole bunch of things I did not: drafts of landing pages and LinkedIn copy and simple financials and a lot more. I am a professor who has taught entrepreneurship (and been an entrepreneur) and I can say confidently that, while not perfect, this was a high-quality start that would have taken a team of MBAs a couple hours to work through. From one prompt.

The other is that this begins the enshittification of consumer AI chat products.

The noise on Reddit and elsewhere was so loud that ChatGPT had to bring back 4o as an option because people missed it.

For months, ChatGPT fans have been waiting for the launch of GPT-5, which OpenAI says comes with major improvements to writing and coding capabilities over its predecessors. But shortly after the flagship AI model launched, many users wanted to go back

OpenAI releases a free GPT model that can run on your laptop by Alex Heath

The model comes in two variants: 120-billion-parameter and 20-billion-parameter versions. The bigger version can run on a single Nvidia GPU and performs similarly to OpenAI’s existing o4-mini model, while the smaller version performs similarly to o3-mini and runs on just 16GB of memory. Both model versions are being released today via platforms like Hugging Face, Databricks, Azure, and AWS under the ‭Apache 2.0 license, which allows them to be widely modified for commercial purposes.

Claude Opus 4.1

Today we're releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning. We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.

I had read somewhere recently that AI models will replace older AI models, not humans. Seems plausible.

Anthropic Revokes OpenAI's Access to Claude

OpenAI was plugging Claude into its own internal tools using special developer access (APIs), instead of using the regular chat interface, according to sources. This allowed the company to run tests to evaluate Claude’s capabilities in things like coding and creative writing against its own AI models, and check how Claude responded to safety-related prompts involving categories like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation, the sources say. The results help OpenAI compare its own models’ behavior under similar conditions and make adjustments as needed.

Introducing study mode

Today we’re introducing study mode in ChatGPT—a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer. Starting today, it’s available to logged in users on Free, Plus, Pro, Team, with availability in ChatGPT Edu coming in the next few weeks.

I tried it, asking it to teach me about typography.

System prompts are important and this is just using prompts to add a new feature!

Reflections on OpenAI

I have been reading so much news these days about Meta taking AI talent from OpenAI and other companies, it was fun to read this little tid-bit here:

When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there's a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I've seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong.

There are other fun insights here as well. It’s seldom we get these types of look inside these companies.

How large models are trained (at a high-level). There's a spectrum from "experimentation" to "engineering". Most ideas start out as small-scale experiments. If the results look promising, they then get incorporated into a bigger run. Experimentation is as much about tweaking the core algorithms as it is tweaking the data mix and carefully studying the results. On the large end, doing a big run almost looks like giant distributed systems engineering. There will be weird edge cases and things you didn't expect. It's up to you to debug them.

Read this in full.