OpenAI ships GPT-5.6 in three tiers, undercuts Claude on price

0:00Welcome to the podcast. Today on the show, OpenAI is limiting the GPT 5.6 rollout because the government has requested that they push it back while they test it out. Because of that, Europe is pushing AI sovereignty because Trump is doing export controls on Fable 5. And now we have OpenAI GPT 5.6 that they say they need a test for it can go out to the world. And also we have a company called Patronus AI that just raised$50 million to stress test AI agents in simulated worlds. So again, we're having this thing where, you know, these models are super powerful that are coming out and the government says hey let us look over them and we have these new companies that are raising money to stress test them open ai is going to be shipping gpt 5.6 in three different tiers and they're going to be undercutting clod on price which i think is important given parts of their mission and micron a new company is overtaking meta and tesla in market valuation because ai memory demand is just exploding and when i say new company this is a new company but it's a new company for many people in the zeitgeist where we're starting to talk about it because of how important it is to the supply chain.

1:03Let's get into what's going on with OpenAI. And speaking of OpenAI, if you've ever wanted to use ChatGPT, but you're like, man, I wish it could do audio generation right inside of it. Or you're like, shoot, I'm, you know, really bummed that ChatGPT is getting rid of Sore, their video model, and you want to use Google VO3 inside of it. Or perhaps you use Claude, and you're like, man, why doesn't Claude do video, image, or audio? I would love for you to try out my own startup, AIbox.ai. We have a new MCP connection that you can connect into your Cloud, into your ChatGPT, or into your Gemini, and give it access to over 80 different AI models right inside of whatever the workstation you use and whatever AI model you're the most familiar with.

1:42I love it because when I'm using Cloud, it's super annoying that it doesn't generate images, and I frequently have to go over to ChatGPT and generate the images over there. So I've actually been able to create some tools on AI Box, some image generation boxes for different projects I have. And inside of Claude, I just tell it to go use AI Box and call the tool that I've created, and it can generate the images, and it gives me a link right inside of Claude. So if you want to give Claude access to generating images, audio, and video, go check out the AI Box MCP. It's$8.99 a month, so it's less than$10, less than ChatGPT or any of the other subscriptions.

2:16And by the way, you can basically use it to replace ChatGPT or Gemini or anything. It has 80-plus different models. It has Grok. It has Mistral. It has tons of cool open source models for audio image and music. Go check it out. AI box dot AI slash MCP. Okay, let's get into what's going on with open AI. The biggest news here, of course, everyone's talking about the fact that the government is forcing them to not roll out the latest model GBT 5.6. They're arguing that this should be temporary. This is coming because Washington right now is, you know, really tightening their oversight on a lot of these different AI models.

2:49I think Anthropic had the biggest pullback because it released Fable 5 before, you know, and the government was like, hey, look, you can't let anyone with foreign access get that. And Anthropic was like, hey, look, we think this is a big misunderstanding. You guys shouldn't be regulating us. What's interesting is we also have Anthropic that just last week put out a report just a few days ago, put out a report to, you know, some government agency where they're like, hey, look, Alibaba over in China did a model distillation attack on us with like 20 million messages to our model. They made 25 ,000 fake accounts and they did 20 million messages and they're going to use those messages to train their model for way cheaper.

3:24And this is dangerous, yada, yada. And then they're like, they're like, well, I don't know why, you know, the government is trying to not let us roll out Fable 5. Well, obviously, the government's worried that when Fable 5 gets out, Alibaba is going to go and, you know, or not just Alibaba. They're probably a, I mean, semi good actor in this. I don't know, but there's probably a lot of other bad actors that could do the same model distillation attack. They could do Fable 5 or anything else. So Anthropica has two sides of the messaging. They're like, look, our models are so good. They're going to destroy the world.

3:52And then they're like, whoa, why are we being regulated? Anyways, so now we have this environment where the government thinks it can decide what models are good and bad. And maybe they can, maybe they can't. I don't know. A lot of people have different opinions on that. GPT 5.6 costs about$5 per million input tokens and$30 per million output tokens. Terra, which is their next one. So they have three tiers. They got Sol, Terra, and Luna. Sol is the$5. Terra is$2.50, and it is then$15, and then Luna is$1.06. So Luna is the cheapest. Sol is the best. OpenAI says that Sol basically matches Anthropics Clawed Mythos 5 on coding, and they say that they're using a third of the tokens, of the output tokens, to build things.

4:38They have safety guardrails, and they say that's all inside of the core model behavior rather than adding this as a separate filter. So with Anthropic, they're like, look, we have Mythos 5. It's super dangerous, but we're going to add all these guardrails on top of it. It'll be fine. And OpenAI says, look, we already built the guardrails inside the model, so you don't need to do that. I mean, is it true? Well, time will tell, right? Is anyone able to hack it? We'll find out. But they're saying that it's just as good as the Mythos 5 model. And they say that it is one third fewer output tokens, which would be incredible if it's actually cheaper and more efficient.

5:10A recent Trump executive order required all venture companies to submit models for for government review up to 30 days before they release. There was no defined safety standards specified there. So anyways, again, just a lot of drama on that. And because of all that drama, Europe is now pushing for AI sovereignty. Trump put in these expert controls and France just secured a hundred billion euros in AI infrastructure pledges. This is anchored by SoftBank's$75 billion data center bet that they're making right now inside of Europe. Europe is, I think, getting honestly, people make this like a big, huge, dramatic thing where they're like, oh, you know, the United States has betrayed Europe or whatever.

5:49And the US is just going to do what the US is going to do. I mean, we're we got all sorts of crazy stuff going on over here. And we also have all the technology. At the end of the day, I think that sovereign AI is a fantastic thing. I think every country should focus on having their own data centers, their own power supply, their own AI models, and shouldn't be, you know, reliant on anyone else. So I think at the end of the day, this isn't a bad thing. This isn't like some big drama needs to happen just because Anthropoc's Claude, you know, Fable model got pulled. Because I think a lot of people are like, you know, the United States like betrayed Europe by pulling the Fable model from European users.

6:23I mean, they just pulled it from everyone in the whole world. And it seems like there's kind of a big policy debate that we're having over here. But in any case, I think that sovereign AI models are fantastic. I'm excited that SoftBank is backing a bunch of those programs. Macron has this thing called Choose France. It's an initiative that they announced where they're going to be building out a bunch of their own data centers. Fantastic. Anthropics single$65 billion fundraise exceeded the entire sum invested in all European and UK AI startups last year combined. So at the end of the day, like there's all of these national programs that are going on, but there's still like a drop in the bucket compared to what just one company in the United States was able to raise.

7:03and then we have a lot of different companies. So I think at the end of the day, Europe should build out what they're focusing on. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity for new innovation to come out of these countries because people will finally be funding national AI, I guess smaller AI companies for geographic reasons rather than everyone just dumping more money into the mega caps, the OpenAI and the Anthropics. So I'm excited to see more competition in the marketplace. one so with all of this drama around these ai models you know coming out and how dangerous are they and how good are they there's a new company called patronus ai and they just raised 50 million dollars it's their series b and the way that what they're doing is they're trying to simulate digital worlds so they're basically testing the new ai agents before they get deployed you can imagine right the government was like um look you got to give us 30 days before you put it out and in my mind i'm like what are you guys doing in 30 days that you could possibly test these things.

7:58Apparently Patronus AI could be an answer to that, where they're simulating the real world and they're taking these AI models and they're just telling them to wreak havoc and seeing what they could actually do. I mean, not really just wreak havoc, but they're trying to stress test it, right? So they're building a simulated world and letting it run there. Their revenue grew 15x in the last year. There's a bunch of different AI labs that are trying to get these kind of testings done. And I think this is a great company that's working on it. Patronus has digital replicas of websites and internal systems where agents can train under reinforcement learning.

8:31It's going to reward task completion and it's going to penalize errors. So it's interesting, right? They have like, you know, like when they say they've made a digital world, it's not like they've like a literal, it's not like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse. They're making a world of computers and systems and code. And they've probably grabbed a whole bunch of open source projects, if I'm being honest and spun up a lot of, you know, a lot of stuff where these models have to try to interact, get tasks done, to probably do penetration testing, that kind of stuff. So notable capital, Lightspeed, Datadog, Samsung, all of them joined Greenfield Partners in this round.

9:03And the total funding for this company is about$70 million. It was just founded in 2023. I'm excited to see where they go with this. A company called Micron has just overtaken Meta and Tesla in market value because of the crazy demand for AI memory. That's, you know, I mean, this isn't just a, this is a problem basically for everyone. We just had Apple yesterday say that they're raising the prices on all MacBooks by$100 MacBook Airs and then$300 on the MacBook Pros. And like basically everything's going up in price because there's this huge memory shortage everywhere, which is caused by AI. It's just like really explosive demand for high bandwidth memory or HBM.

9:40And this is of course used for AI training clusters. So something that a lot of people are bringing up is that this is basically showing that memory and not just GPUs alone are now kind of gating and or kind of like a constraint for the AI infrastructure build out. I think in the past, everyone was like, Oh, man, how are we ever going to get enough GPUs from Nvidia and Nvidia has like, you know, limits to how many they'll sell to a specific company. And that was kind of, I guess, the last couple years, what everyone's been worried about, no longer is it GPUs. Now we're just literally running out of memory.

10:09And that's going to kind of hold back the AI infrastructure build out. So I think these suppliers that are really kind of have a bottleneck on the memory infrastructure are going to be making a ton of money and micron is one of them and by the way hbm is basically a custom something that is custom engineered for nvidia accelerators and it's sold under multi-year supply agreements they sell this at a premium pricing that basically traditional dram can never get so only three companies can actually manufacture hbm at scale that's micron sk hinnix which is i believe in Korea and then also Samsung.

10:45And I believe SK Hennix is planning an IPO in the United States soon, or they're at least looking at this. And then Samsung. And so basically, there is some enormous price power for suppliers, because there's this kind of two year demand search that's been coming. There's not a lot of suppliers that are able to make this. Meta and Tesla both, which are huge hyperscalers, now rank below the component supplier Micron, which both of them are using, right? They're both dependent on Micron. But I think that just goes to show how much projected AI growth is tied to infrastructure. You know, they actually have to go buy this externally.

11:19And so it's incredible to see the run up that Micron has been doing. Guys, thank you so much for joining the podcast today for tuning in. If you learned anything new, if you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts on Apple, leave a comment, I read them all drop some stars if there's any topics or companies you want covered, or things you'd like me to talk about more. And make sure to go check out AIbox.ai slash MCP. I'll leave a link in the description if you want to get images, audio, and video inside of Claude or any of your other models. You can get access to over 80 different AI models inside whatever AI tool or whatever AI model you're using.

11:56All right, thanks so much for tuning in. I'll catch you all in the next episode.