Anthropic's Opus 4.6 and OpenAI's Codex: New AI Models Compete

0:00Anthropic has just released their latest top of the line model Opus 4.6 and I think most importantly this is a huge upgrade to their most popular product which is cloud cloud code. Now, 15 minutes after they made this big announcement, OpenAI immediately dropped their own competitor to this AI model with their own update. OpenAI is doing a whole bunch of new features to try to get to the enterprise users that use Anthropic. There's been a ton of beef online over the last couple of days from Anthropic running an ad, and allegedly they're going to have a Super Bowl ad that is coming after OpenAI, and Sam Altman is replying on Twitter.

0:35There's so much drama that we're going to break down in this episode today and show some of the really cool use cases of the latest models. So there's a lot to get into. Before we do that, I wanted to mention, if you want to test out any of the latest models from Anthropic, from OpenAI, from Google, from Grok, from all of the top companies, including 11 Labs for Audio and tons of really cool image models, go check out AIbox.ai. We'll let you access all the top AI models in one place for 20 bucks a month. And you get all of your files in one place. You don't So Vibe build tools by just explaining what type of tool you want.

1:08And our AI builder will link together different models. So there's a bunch of cool different things you can do. But I think a lot of people love the fact that you get access to all of the AI models in one place. I'll link it in the description. It is AIbox.ai. Okay, let's get into what has just been released. I think prior to this kind of Opus 4.6, Opus 4.5 came out in November of last year. And so I think right now, Anthropic is obviously trying to get the reach of their model to kind of get out of a small segment of users, which is mostly developers and professional and enterprise. Now, not that a small segment is a bad thing, like they're not making a lot of money.

1:44They're making an insane amount of money because most of their users are paying hundreds of dollars. The API credits are crazy when you're talking about developers. Personally, I pay hundreds of dollars a month in, you know, Claude credits for development and to build things. So it definitely is making a lot more money than just my$20 a month OpenAI ChatGPT subscription, but they're trying to get a broader reach. I think one of the biggest additions is what they are now calling, quote unquote, agent teams. So rather than just relying on a single agent to work through different, you know, a task sequentially, agent teams allowed really large jobs to be broken into smaller pieces that multiple agents, according to Anthropic, can then tackle at the same time.

2:25This is one of their biggest updates. It's really what I said about it. They said, quote, instead of one agent working through tasks sequentially, you can split the work across multiple agents, each owning its piece and coordinating directly with the others. This is Anthropoc saying this in a big press release. Scott Weiss, who's Anthropoc's head of product, basically said that this feature is like having a really talented team of humans working together by segmenting responsibilities. So the different agents can actually coordinate in parallel and then they can move much faster. agent teams are currently available as a research preview for API users and subscribers.

2:59And so this new Opus 4.5 also is going to be introducing some really big context windows that have been expanded. Now, this is something that I think a lot of people have used kind of as a leverage point. Like classically or like famously, Anthropic had a bigger context window than OpenAI for many years when ShadGPT first came out. And that's why a lot of people would use it. And this is, I think, basically the first use case for myself with Anthropic, why I was originally using it was it was just a much bigger context window for things and then of course open ai kind of opened them up and then google came out with a massive context window um because of this anthropic has come out swinging their new models now support up to a million tokens of context which is what google famously did with gemini that got it a lot of usage and this is matching what anthropic already offers with sonnet 4 and 4.5 so that really massive memory makes it much easier to work with kind of huge code bases, large documents, and it lets you do a lot more complex multi-step workflows just with a single kind of in one single conversation, which is really cool.

3:59So Anthropic is also deepening Claude's integration with everyday productivity tools. There was a post on Bloomberg that said basically the SaaS crash in the market that's been happening over the last couple days is due to Anthropic releasing some of these deeper integrations with a bunch of SaaS tools and people are realizing maybe we don't even need the SaaS products at all. Maybe Anthropic and Claude and what they're doing and some of these tools that they're replacing because they came up with a bunch of different tools are crashing the markets basically because people are going to stop paying for some of these tools.

4:31So with Opus 4.5, Claude now is directly inside of PowerPoint as a side panel. Previously, users could ask Claude to generate a presentation, but then you still have to go export it. You had to edit it and it was kind of a separate file, which was a pain. Now your presentations are going to be built and you can actually go define them and refine them directly inside of PowerPoint with Claude's assistance. So that's a cool feature. In addition, I mean, I have the Claude, I have the Claude Google Chrome extension, which, you know, is a side panel. And if I was on PowerPoint, I could tell it to go and make edits and it could just like take over my screen and do that.

5:05So that's also kind of a cool feature. But according to Anthropoc, all of these changes are trying to basically show how While Opus has evolved beyond just kind of its original niche, which was developers, what started as a model, which was basically known for like software development, has now grown into something that can do a lot more. It can support a lot more people and doing a lot more different professional tasks. Here's what they recently said. They said, we noticed a lot of people who are not professional software developers using Cloud Code, primarily because it was a really amazing engine to do tasks.

5:35They said that Anthropik has now seen adoption, not just from engineers, but from a lot of product managers, a lot of financial analysts, a lot of professionals in a lot of different industries. Now, the competition is definitely heating up. Anthropic isn't the only one going after the development area. OpenAI is trying to really pitch heavily for it. I've recently been testing out Codex, which is a tool that OpenAI has. They kind of had this Codex code model for a while, but they recently came out with a Mac app that I downloaded and have been playing around with. They're trying to compete with Cloud Code.

6:06And what's interesting is in this brand new release that Anthropic did, apparently OpenAI and Anthropic were scheduled to release their new coding models at the exact same time. Anthropic bumped it up by 15 minutes to beat OpenAI to the punch. and so after you know anthropic did this whole release 15 minutes later gpt 5.3 codex was launched so openai says that this new model is going to turn codex from a tool that can write and review code into one that can handle almost anything developers do on a computer including professionals as well they said that after they tested a bunch of against a bunch of different like internal benchmarks they say i mean this is their claim that gpt 5.3 codex can build quote highly functional, complex games and applications from scratch over the course of days.

6:53OpenAI right now is saying that their model runs about 25 % faster than GPT 5.2. And they also said that this is the first model that they have created that was used, like essentially they use this a ton to help them debug and evaluate itself as they were building it. So they were using, you know, GPT 5.2 to develop GPT 5.3, which is a big deal for them. I think the timing definitely wasn't an accident opening open AI in Anthropic right releasing these things 15 minutes apart and really opening I was trying to release it at the same time to try to steal some of their thunder opening right now is very ambitious but it's also looking farther beyond coding uh just this week they said uh they also unveiled open AI frontier which is an end-to-end platform designed to help enterprises build deploy and manage AI agents basically frontier is an open platform meaning that companies can manage agents built outside of OpenAI's ecosystem as well as ones that are built inside of it, which is kind of cool.

7:49But with Frontier, different businesses can connect agents to external data and applications, and then they can kind of define what those agents are allowed to access, and they can limit what actions they can take. OpenAI says that the system is modeled after how companies manage human employees and how that kind of competes with onboarding processes and feedback loops, which are intended to try to improve agent performance over time. OpenAI also said, you know, they're highlighted a bunch of different customers that are using this. They say HP, Oracle, State Farm, Uber, all of those are using Frontier and apparently, you know, loving it.

8:25You know, if he's from according to OpenAI, they said that the pricing hasn't been disclosed and they haven't really commented on any sort of costs associated with this, which is interesting because it's, I don't know, it's like an announcement, but you of want to know what what what the damage is going to be the whole agent management platforms i think have really become very important for these agent the ai companies right now uh agents are just surging in how useful they are and you know even since 2024 salesforce launched their own product which is agent force back in 2024 i think there's a lot of other people that are um using tools like lane chain and crew ai that also have raised a ton of venture funding to kind of compete in that space.

9:06And in December, Gartner described agent management platforms as both, quote, the most valuable real estate in AI and also basically a really important piece of infrastructure for AI adoption. I think if you look at that and you kind of look at that context, OpenAI kind of making this big push into agent management early this year is not very surprising. They've made, you know, the enterprise adoption a huge focus this year. They already have some really big partnerships with ServiceNow and Snowflake that they've announced. So I think if OpenAI hopes to become kind of the long-term force in the enterprise market, Frontier looks like a really good step in that direction.

9:40And of course, there's a lot of competition. I mean, we're looking at Anthropic, we're looking at OpenAI, there's just everyone's battling right now to be the platform that leads agents, the platform that's, you know, leading developers. I think that the competition is fierce, but it's interesting to see these two players kind of compete against each other. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed this episode, it'd mean the world to me if you left a rating or review. Honestly, it just helps to show a ton to get found by people. and I always love to hear what you think if you enjoyed an episode or if this is something that's useful for you or if you'd like me to cover different ideas, topics, genres, let me know in the comments and as a review on the show.

10:17Helps a ton. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you guys all in the next episode. As always, make sure to check out AIbox.ai to get access to all of the best models in one place. Catch you in the next episode.