THIS WEEK IN AI: Grok is Back, ChatGPT 5.6, Meta's New Models, China's Threats

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So many new AI releases this week! Including xAI’s Grok 4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6, we discuss their coding, reasoning, and benchmark performance. OpenAI also introduced a new full-duplex voice mode, which lets users speak and listen at the same time, and may preview future AI interfaces.

We also discuss Chinese AI labs building their own chips to reduce reliance on NVIDIA and imported hardware. And finally, a few updates on Meta’s new image and video models, ByteDance’s SeeDream image model, and Cloudflare’s payments API for micropayments and AI agent access.sis)

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Grok Is Back
2:03 Cheap Intelligence Wins
3:51 Cursor Deal Pays Off
6:21 GPT 5.6 Arrives
10:05 Voice Mode Breakthrough
15:17 China’s Chip Push
20:32 Meta’s New Visuals
25:06 ByteDance Joins Image Gen
26:36 Cloudflare Opens Payments
28:21 Wrap-Up And Farewell

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Ejaaz:
I've been waiting so long to say this. Elon is officially back.

Ejaaz:
The first major AI model released from SpaceX AI since they went public,

Ejaaz:
since the $60 billion cursor acquisition is officially live.

Ejaaz:
It's called Grok 4.5 and it's pretty damn good.

Ejaaz:
It ranks around three after Fable 5 and GPT 5.5, but it's really good at coding

Ejaaz:
and it's astonishingly cheap. It's around half the cost of Opus 4.8 and it's

Ejaaz:
their quickest model yet.

Ejaaz:
Elon only got to enjoy this for about a day or maybe even a couple of hours

Ejaaz:
because GPT 5.6 was officially released from OpenAI. And if you're listening

Ejaaz:
to this, you probably have access to it right now, a general release.

Ejaaz:
It's their best model yet, extremely good energetic reasoning,

Ejaaz:
but not quite fable worthy. But they are training GPT 6, which is going to be

Ejaaz:
released supposedly a month from now. If you're releasing models,

Ejaaz:
you're probably thinking that's amazing for the AI world.

Ejaaz:
But this comes right at a time where our main adversary in China has been releasing

Ejaaz:
so many models that are open source and everyone gets to use it.

Ejaaz:
They're super cheap, but they might be considering cutting off the West from using their models.

Ejaaz:
Meanwhile, Meta, who spent around $25 billion trying to build the best model

Ejaaz:
and have seemingly failed, just released two new models there,

Ejaaz:
Metamuse Image and Metamuse Video Models. We're going to get into all of this

Ejaaz:
and more on today's episode.

Josh:
There's a lot going on. It feels like nothing happens for a week or two,

Josh:
and then five different releases happen all in one day. And that's what just

Josh:
happened. We got new JATGPT. We have a new voice interface, which I love that we'll get into.

Josh:
But I think we do have to start with Grok because I mean, like you said, Elon is back.

Josh:
The SpaceX AI team, which is now officially formalized, they have a logo,

Josh:
they have their official Twitter handle on X.

Josh:
This is their first release in a long time and the results are pretty remarkable.

Josh:
They're kind of classifying this as Opus class on a relative basis compared to Claude Opus 4.8.

Josh:
And it seems to have actually accomplished that on just about all of the benchmarks.

Josh:
In fact, it even exceeds it slightly in some benchmarks for a fraction of the

Josh:
cost. And I think this is one of the more interesting things about this model

Josh:
is just how efficient it is for how much intelligence you get out.

Josh:
And I know that the XAI team or the SpaceX AI team, they've always been really

Josh:
insistent on maximizing the.

Josh:
Amount of intelligence per watt of compute. And it seems like this is the first

Josh:
sign of that actually working.

Josh:
For the same amount of power and electricity, they're able to generate tokens

Josh:
that have more intelligence per token than just about anyone else.

Josh:
Like you mentioned, Ejaz, the new Grok model is being trained.

Josh:
It is currently cooking in the oven. They have all the GPUs humming.

Josh:
And when that comes out, I really believe that they're going to have a shot at the top.

Josh:
And we talked about this way in the past, maybe like two or three months ago, about how the spacex ai

Josh:
opportunities really just in their ability to build out infrastructure quickly

Josh:
and as a result they actually had too much infrastructure for their use cases

Josh:
they were selling it off to amazon they were selling it off to anthropic because

Josh:
they just had access and it created this huge business model for them

Josh:
but now they actually have a use case for this they're starting to take these

Josh:
gpus they're starting to train the models and the results are actually great

Josh:
and it's like okay wow they were they're acquired for a couple months but now

Josh:
here they are right back on the frontier and you have to imagine

Josh:
that the next model that's being trained on however many trillions of parameters

Josh:
is going to be right up there at least very close to the frontier for what i

Josh:
would imagine is a very very competitive price.

Ejaaz:
I think i think the most hilarious part about this is this is probably elon's

Ejaaz:
most humble model launch ever he was uh super up front saying you know this

Ejaaz:
is opus 4.8 class grade model it's not as good as fable but we are training

Ejaaz:
a much larger model speaking of size

Ejaaz:
The size of this model, GROC 4.5, is only around 1.4 trillion parameter models.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you compare that to Fable 5, that's around 10 to 15 trillion parameters in size.

Ejaaz:
So the fact that they were able to achieve number three on some of these coding

Ejaaz:
benchmarks, like the one that we're showing on your screen right now,

Ejaaz:
DeepSwee Bench, is pretty impressive. And you can only imagine what a model,

Ejaaz:
maybe five times the size of this, could probably be quite competitive.

Ejaaz:
And this brings me to the absolute Hail Mary move that Elon and SpaceX AI pulled

Ejaaz:
off a few months ago, or actually less than a month ago, which was the $60 billion acquisition of Cursor.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you're wondering... Did that pay off? Yeah, it paid off massively.

Ejaaz:
Like, just to bring people up to speed here, at the time of their public IPO,

Ejaaz:
It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that SpaceX had fallen behind in the race.

Ejaaz:
They hadn't released a meaningful model. Grok 4.2 kind of sucked.

Ejaaz:
And OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be just running away with it.

Ejaaz:
With 4.5, they have officially caught up and it's because they've been using

Ejaaz:
this moat, this data moat that Cursor has.

Ejaaz:
For those of you who don't know, for those of you who haven't used Cursor,

Ejaaz:
Cursor is this amazing platform that kind of like pulls prompts across many

Ejaaz:
different models and routes it to the right model at the right time to do the

Ejaaz:
right types of tasks. It's also extremely cost efficient.

Ejaaz:
Now that kind of data is really valuable towards training new models.

Ejaaz:
It's not just about how much compute you put into train a model.

Ejaaz:
It is about how you figure out how that model thinks. And Cursor's data mode

Ejaaz:
is really useful for that. So that $60 billion acquisition seems to have paid off pretty damn well.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you're wondering whether I should switch to GROC 4.5,

Ejaaz:
if you're using your LLMs to do Google searches and do basic research, I would say no.

Ejaaz:
But if you are a software engineer, if you're trying to build a new app,

Ejaaz:
I would say absolutely yes, give it a go, because this model was designed to build.

Ejaaz:
Some of the demos, which we'll show shortly, has been pretty awesome.

Ejaaz:
It builds apps from scratch, builds simulators from scratch,

Ejaaz:
and it's super cheap and fast to use.

Ejaaz:
I it's around 17 times cheaper than opus 4.8 puttas it's pretty awesome

Josh:
Yeah i was looking at the the sw bench um benchmarks that they offer and it

Josh:
showed that the average is solved in about 16 000 tokens versus opus which is

Josh:
solved in 67 000 tokens so it's about a 4.2 times gap

Josh:
on efficiency which is like really impressive if you're paying for these tokens

Josh:
and you want something more efficient this is a model at least to try to put

Josh:
it in your toolkit to test it out to see where it walls.

Josh:
And hey, if you don't like this one, there's some better news for you because Elon says that,

Josh:
spacex ai will ship a completely new from scratch foundation model every single

Josh:
month through the end of 2026 which is

Josh:
pretty unbelievable like that's one of those where i'll believe it when i see

Josh:
it because like a foundation model from scratch to build every single month

Josh:
seems like a lot they're gonna have.

Ejaaz:
To be training a lot of these in parallel he has around 500 000 gpus which

Josh:
Is so crazy it is the largest cluster.

Ejaaz:
But he he has enough gpus to feasibly train these models i think it's it might be true yeah

Josh:
Yeah so i mean if you think of it he's got this giant bakery and he's got like

Josh:
a couple different ovens going at once all cooking various size

Josh:
desserts those desserts coming in the form of grok so i'm really excited that

Josh:
they're back i'm excited to see how they evolve over the next few months it

Josh:
seems like now that they've launched the first one

Josh:
the next ones are going to come in pretty rapid iteration and we will have our

Josh:
finger on the pulse but that is not the only model launch in fact that is certainly

Josh:
not the best model launch we had this week because,

Josh:
gpt 5.6 is here finally it was kind of here it was here last week or two weeks

Josh:
ago whenever they were released it but it unfortunately got a little blocker from the government,

Josh:
they've cleared things up with the government they said okay your model is good

Josh:
to go so now it is good to go and if you were listening to this podcast,

Josh:
chances are you can go and use it right now we are a little early to the news

Josh:
it hasn't quite released publicly for the world at the time of recording so

Josh:
we don't have any interesting demos

Josh:
we will probably record a lot of cool demos showcasing all the capabilities

Josh:
model at some point in the near future but for now we have the news that it's

Josh:
out and this is all three they have gpt 5.6 soul terra and luna all broadly

Josh:
available, and they are very much at the frontier.

Josh:
Their costs are, I think, $5 per million input, $30 per million output,

Josh:
so cheaper than Fable, and seems like it's a pretty good model.

Josh:
The results on X seem like people are really enjoying this so far.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, so I was scouring across all the early tested reviews from Theo,

Ejaaz:
from a bunch of other folks.

Ejaaz:
And one thing stood out pretty massively to me, which is OpenAI seems to have

Ejaaz:
solved the toughest problem that they've or the toughest critique that they've

Ejaaz:
been facing, which is taste.

Ejaaz:
So when you use ChatGPT, I don't know if you've used it recently,

Ejaaz:
Josh, it still seems pretty sycophantic. It still sounds like I'm talking to

Ejaaz:
an AI bot versus a human that can actually help me or like a companion that

Ejaaz:
can like help me complete my task.

Ejaaz:
With GPT 5.6, it seems that the feedback is overwhelmingly in favor of taste. It sounds better to use.

Ejaaz:
It's more of a friend to kind of consult with.

Ejaaz:
And that has swayed people to switch from Fable 5 to GPT 5.6.

Ejaaz:
Now, it's important to mention that it isn't really a direct competitor to GPT

Ejaaz:
5.6, according to these reviews.

Ejaaz:
Apparently, it still lacks when it comes to certain complex tasks at coding,

Ejaaz:
when it comes to certain complex tasks at reasoning, but it is much, much better.

Ejaaz:
It's a big jump from GPT 5.5. Now, if you're wondering what the fable competitor

Ejaaz:
from OpenAI is, it's called GPT 6.

Ejaaz:
And according to Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, he said that it's aiming

Ejaaz:
to come out in under a month, potentially.

Ejaaz:
So again, we're looking at a new paradigm, a new era right now where the top

Ejaaz:
model labs are basically releasing a new model every single month.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you compare that to what that looked like,

Ejaaz:
I don't know, a year ago, we had to wait months. We had to wait months.

Ejaaz:
There were draughts between the news cycles, if you remember, Josh.

Josh:
I don't know how we did it. It was so long between each model launch.

Josh:
It was literally multiple months.

Ejaaz:
It's so funny because I remember we had a lot of time to test these different

Ejaaz:
models. Remember we attributed a personality to each of these different models?

Josh:
Now they're kind.

Ejaaz:
Of converging across this one uniform kind of face and voice,

Ejaaz:
and they're kind of flitting between each other.

Ejaaz:
I honestly am It is the best time alive if you are a builder,

Ejaaz:
if you are someone that's interested in using these models and testing them

Ejaaz:
out, you now get access to all of this stuff for a $20 a month subscription.

Ejaaz:
So I'm super excited to actually get my hands on this and use it.

Ejaaz:
If you're listening to this right now, I probably already am doing this,

Ejaaz:
but you can expect an episode as soon as next week to show you what you can do with it.

Josh:
And this is also great news for people who aren't developers,

Josh:
who aren't builders, people who just want to use the model.

Josh:
Not only is it more intelligent but also you have a new voice model today as

Josh:
well which is really exciting so the voice model is something that we did have

Josh:
time to play around with i was testing it last night i was chatting with it and it's um

Josh:
pretty good i love the launch video that they have we're showing it can we play

Josh:
a clip yeah yeah please play some audio it's very funny.

Ejaaz:
Let's see let's see

Ejaaz:
Today, we are announcing the all-new chat GPT Voice, powered by GPT Live 1,

Ejaaz:
a full duplex conversational partner that is the most powerful voice model ever built.

Josh:
Can you simplify that?

Ejaaz:
Sure can. Can you explain what a full duplex voice model is?

Ejaaz:
Yeah. Imagine a normal call with a friend.

Ejaaz:
You can listen and talk at the same time. That's full duplex.

Josh:
There you go. And that's the news. It's like you can now listen and talk at

Josh:
the same time and you could talk over this voice in a way that you never were able to before.

Josh:
And I will say this isn't novel technology. GPT launched this kind of as like

Josh:
a research preview for more developers a month or two ago where it's kind of

Josh:
live intelligence. But now it's rolled into the actual application and it's awesome.

Josh:
You can yell at it. You can argue at it. You could have it think about things

Josh:
while you are talking about something else.

Josh:
I was doing a little demo where I was asking it to do some research about something.

Josh:
And then we continued the conversation in parallel while it was researching in the background.

Josh:
And then once it had the correct answer, it came back and it said,

Josh:
hey, by the way, that thing you asked me, here's the answer.

Josh:
And it felt very natural in a way that I've never felt before.

Josh:
And watching this demo and getting the opportunity to try it,

Josh:
I noticed that there were some new visual elements as well.

Josh:
So when I asked like, hey, what's the weather in New York City?

Josh:
I wanted to see how fast I could pull that up. It was close to instant.

Josh:
And then it shows this like really pretty card on screen that gives you just

Josh:
brief overview of all the weather that's going on.

Josh:
And I'm thinking to myself, this is the first version of whatever their new

Josh:
operating system is going to look like for this hardware device.

Josh:
We have all the rumors in the world about what it's going to look like,

Josh:
what it's going to feel like, and we know that voice is going to be at the core of it.

Josh:
So getting an opportunity to interface with a new voice, I could very clearly

Josh:
see this working well with an AirPods-like device. It's like when I'm walking down the street,

Josh:
You could chat with it very naturally. It talks back to you.

Josh:
It has the context of everything around you. And it's really exciting to try.

Josh:
So I would encourage everyone who has a ChatGPT account, give it a shot.

Josh:
It's like pretty cool technology.

Ejaaz:
This might be a hot take, but I think this is OpenAI's biggest release so far

Ejaaz:
of this year. And it's because I think voice is just the way people are going

Ejaaz:
to communicate with AI going forwards. I can't type as quick as I can think.

Ejaaz:
And in fact, like, I can't remember the last time I typed towards my LLM.

Ejaaz:
I use whisper AI or I use the microphone and I just kind of like speak at Claude

Ejaaz:
or I speak at GPT and it comes back with very useful insights.

Ejaaz:
It's a much more natural way of interacting.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you listen to this and you're thinking,

Ejaaz:
Why is this significant? Like I've been using voice the entire time.

Ejaaz:
Well, I hate to inform you, but you might have been using a lesser lower grade model.

Ejaaz:
Voice typically works on older models, not the cutting edge models.

Ejaaz:
It takes a while to kind of like catch up and re-implement with like the GPT

Ejaaz:
5.5, GPT 5.6. For example, I doubt this is supported by 5.6.

Ejaaz:
So you're already accessing a lower level of intelligence. With this new voice

Ejaaz:
upgrade, you now get access to the higher set of things.

Ejaaz:
It also finally implements a really useful feature that I enjoyed from Thinking

Ejaaz:
Machine Labs. So Mira Murati, who was the former CTO of OpenAI,

Ejaaz:
left to set up her own AI lab.

Ejaaz:
She created this model called the interaction model under Thinking Machine Labs.

Ejaaz:
And it does a lot of what is shown on this video right now, where you can kind of like interrupt it.

Ejaaz:
You can kind of like talk to yourself and it knows it's not talking to you.

Ejaaz:
Very natural human type interactions.

Ejaaz:
We've finally got this feature in OpenAI. So now I'm thinking about her lab

Ejaaz:
and what she's built and what her mode is.

Ejaaz:
And I'm thinking, what's the point of using that when I can just do this on OpenAI?

Ejaaz:
And again, it's this trend repeated constantly of these frontier AI labs that

Ejaaz:
are basically looking over the fence, seeing what competitors are doing and

Ejaaz:
saying, you know what, that's pretty cool.

Ejaaz:
I'll get AI to build this in a couple of weeks and launch it ourselves. Well done from OpenAI.

Josh:
Yeah, I like the point of it being the most important release it very much feels

Josh:
like this is the critical release like this is the future way that we are going to interface with ai

Josh:
and for them to really nail this and to make it a great product in the mobile

Josh:
app is step one before it gets moved everywhere else and you could i wonder

Josh:
i have a feeling that's probably why they used older people these are all grandmas they

Josh:
three grandmas it's like okay as for everyone of all ages anyone could speak

Josh:
anyone could have a conversation now you have an ai to converse with.

Ejaaz:
My fiance's grandma uses this every day and I'm not joking because I looked

Ejaaz:
at her tracking usage, three to four hours on average per day. She talks to it.

Ejaaz:
As a friend, as a companion, as a consultant, as a gossip artist,

Ejaaz:
when she's gossiping with her friends, it's insane.

Josh:
That's unbelievable. People use this. That's high signal too,

Josh:
coming from an older audience, because I don't think anyone's really tapped into that just yet.

Josh:
So this is definitely a place to follow along closely. And my God,

Josh:
we are halfway there to the end of the year when we are going to be getting

Josh:
a preview of whatever this new hardware device is.

Josh:
I am certain that it will be running some form of this voice mode.

Josh:
Next up on the docket, Chinese AI labs are building their own chips while buying NVIDIAs.

Josh:
Ejaz, as our resident Chinese expert, what the hell's going on?

Ejaaz:
Hi, reporting from Beijing over here. Okay, so a narrative that we've consistently

Ejaaz:
talked about on this show is China versus the US.

Ejaaz:
If you are a new listener, China versus the US is probably the biggest air battle

Ejaaz:
that's happening out there.

Ejaaz:
And the biggest kind of question is, can China catch up to America's frontier

Ejaaz:
of AI models? So far, they've been able to keep up pretty well,

Ejaaz:
but they've lacked in one main thing, which is their chip architecture.

Ejaaz:
They've had to buy and source and rely on NVIDIA chips.

Ejaaz:
Until maybe the last couple of months where they announced that companies like

Ejaaz:
Huawei are building their own AI chips and the government has mandated all Chinese

Ejaaz:
AI labs to use Chinese chips.

Ejaaz:
Okay, maybe there needs to be some kind of political resolve there.

Ejaaz:
But now we got announcements for not one, but two AI labs, including the major

Ejaaz:
AI lab from China, DeepSeek, that they're developing their own AI chip,

Ejaaz:
according to a bunch of people that are familiar

Ejaaz:
with the matter, in order to reduce its reliance on NVIDIA and Huawei chips alone.

Ejaaz:
So even just relying less on Chinese manufacturers and focusing on their own AI chips.

Ejaaz:
Now, if I had to guess why an AI lab would do this, it would be twofold.

Ejaaz:
One, you don't want to rely on export controls and restrictions.

Ejaaz:
You know, Trump or any other future US president might say, I don't want to

Ejaaz:
sell you any more GPUs and your model is dead in the water.

Ejaaz:
But number two, the most important one is, I think these AI labs are trying

Ejaaz:
to create a vertically integrated stack. What I mean by that is it's not only

Ejaaz:
good enough to create your own intelligent model right now.

Ejaaz:
You kind of want to own the hardware and infrastructure that it runs on because

Ejaaz:
then you can optimize it specifically for your model.

Ejaaz:
So it could be cheaper, it could work much faster, and it could arguably be more intelligent.

Ejaaz:
If you don't believe me, look at what OpenAI is doing. Well,

Ejaaz:
look at what Meta is doing. They're working on their own chips.

Ejaaz:
OpenAI is releasing their new jalapeno chip nine months from now.

Ejaaz:
So if they end up pulling this off, I think we see a world, honestly,

Ejaaz:
a year from now, where a lot of these labs create their own chips and they run

Ejaaz:
it on their own infrastructure. Less reliance on NVIDIA.

Josh:
I found it really interesting how they've been so quiet about which chips or

Josh:
if they're even making chips at all.

Josh:
And then within 24 hours or within even hours of each other,

Josh:
we got the leaks from two places, both DeepSeek and Jipu, both building their own custom chips.

Josh:
And I think it's this interesting coordinated effort that we're beginning to

Josh:
see with this rotation, perhaps from open source to more closed source as they

Josh:
feel like they're getting more powerful.

Josh:
So as they get the capability to build these custom asic chips these custom inference chips and

Josh:
i'll note that these aren't really pre-training chips these are custom built

Josh:
accelerator chips similar to that episode that we filmed with etched about etched

Josh:
uh the other day where these are very purpose-built chips built for optimizing

Josh:
a specific stack and it's very clear that china is now in this race and they're trying to

Josh:
get themselves as close to the frontier as possible and in a way they're basically

Josh:
now just mirroring the u.s one-to-one it's like open ai has jalapeno.

Josh:
Now deep seek is going to build their own custom asic chip and they're doing

Josh:
it the same place they're probably using some of the same suppliers i have to

Josh:
imagine at least the same memory supplier so they are now at war in terms of

Josh:
supply chain with the united states so now traditionally the u.s versus china has been

Josh:
fought on a software front this is the first instances in which there's probably some

Josh:
going to be some serious competition on the hardware front at least as it relates

Josh:
to supply chain and manufacturing these things because the capacity to do this

Josh:
is so limited so really interesting developments coming out of china and we'll

Josh:
see what they can build with these now we know the process is very long to go from

Josh:
chip architecture to taping out a chip to building a chip and actually producing

Josh:
it at scale then plugging it in

Josh:
and then training a model and then publishing a model so that takes a very long

Josh:
time it's going to be a while until we get the first models that have actually

Josh:
been trained on these chips but the seeds are being planted now for pretty,

Josh:
i would say impressive future from china if they continue on this path.

Ejaaz:
I i personally think it's a it's a bigger problem than people are making out

Ejaaz:
like i remember two years ago when people were like oh china would never catch

Ejaaz:
up and back then it was true they were like three years behind

Ejaaz:
now that gap is only really six months and if you can project into the future

Ejaaz:
let's say that they create a chip that's maybe not nvidia level but it's like

Ejaaz:
80 to 90 percent nvidia level

Ejaaz:
you could probably train a fable 5 or mythos 5 grade model from that and the

Ejaaz:
chinese His Chibu founder has literally said, we'll have this ready in a few

Ejaaz:
months, definitely before the end of the year.

Ejaaz:
Now, remember, China isn't the US. There may not be any strict restrictions

Ejaaz:
on this. They may use it nefariously.

Ejaaz:
They may use it maliciously. And these models are pretty capable of some dangerous stuff.

Ejaaz:
So I think one of the biggest missteps that we've made, at least on the Western

Ejaaz:
side of things, is imposing these export controls because it's meant that they

Ejaaz:
have been forced to create their own chip architecture. and

Ejaaz:
that's what China relied on a lot. I think if they, if we could have just sold

Ejaaz:
them a few more NVIDIA GPUs, we would have made them more reliant on the architecture,

Ejaaz:
but now it's going to become a heavily siloed thing.

Ejaaz:
And I think, like you said, we're going to lose access to these open source

Ejaaz:
models. I bet you they're going to close source a bunch of the future meter-square models.

Josh:
Yeah. Well, I have another company for you that used to be open source and they've gone close source.

Josh:
So maybe we have a peek into the future because that company comes in the form of meta.

Josh:
Remember them when they were so hell bent on creating open source models that were going to

Josh:
change the world be accessible to everyone well it turns out that didn't happen

Josh:
uh the same way that the metaverse didn't happen but we still call them meta

Josh:
sorry i i feel bad for roasting them but oh my god it's so easy to every single

Josh:
time but anyways meta is back in the news because they have done something interesting and novel in fact

Josh:
um well i will say i didn't actually realize this was the news ej has filmed

Josh:
me right before we recorded i was like oh wow they did release something this

Josh:
week and that comes in the form of muse image and muse spark you'll remember the Muse models.

Josh:
Oh, I feel so bad roasting them. But like the last experience we had with Muse

Josh:
models, that was when everyone's Instagram accounts got hacked.

Josh:
So they're back at it again with a new model. This one now focused on visuals and videos.

Josh:
What is different about this model than the previous one? Because I remember

Josh:
we had that like AI slop TikTok feed thing that kind of came and went from meta.

Josh:
Is this kind of the next iteration on that model?

Ejaaz:
It's not the next iteration, but it's the...

Ejaaz:
It's the power infrastructure. It's the thing that will power all those future

Ejaaz:
MetaBibes apps and stuff.

Ejaaz:
So the quick TLDR is, this is their new image and video model,

Ejaaz:
and it is a lot, lot better than their previous image and video models.

Ejaaz:
Now, the bar admittedly was set pretty low back then.

Ejaaz:
I would say this is where Grok Imagine currently is.

Ejaaz:
When I look at this, when I look at Grok Imagine, they're relatively the kind

Ejaaz:
of same grade of quality, which is impressive for Meta because this is a big

Ejaaz:
jump from their previous model. Now, why I like this model specifically is how it works.

Ejaaz:
There's been this recent trend across any LLM in OpenAI, Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
with the recent CROC 4.5 model, which is called agentic reasoning or agentic thinking.

Ejaaz:
What that means is they allow the model to, one, access more tools to do its

Ejaaz:
thinking, and two, to think more. They give it more tokens. Meta has one of

Ejaaz:
the largest data centers out there.

Ejaaz:
So that's what they did with this model. So it's not necessarily an intelligent model,

Ejaaz:
thinks more. It uses web search to look at potential images that might make

Ejaaz:
sense for the request that you have.

Ejaaz:
It then gets inspired from those images and it generates its own version and

Ejaaz:
then it looks at it and it thinks, hmm, will Josh like this?

Ejaaz:
If it's not good enough to Josh's expectations, I'm going to either edit this

Ejaaz:
using my editing tools or I'm going to completely regenerate this from scratch.

Ejaaz:
So you may have to wait a little bit longer, but you end up getting a much better output. And guess what?

Ejaaz:
It's cheaper because the tokens that they serve from their own data centers are cheaper to serve.

Ejaaz:
So all around a good engineering effort from Meta. I don't think they're anywhere

Ejaaz:
near Fable 5 LLM worthy, but I actually don't think it matters.

Ejaaz:
I think their main focus should be on niche things like this to do what they're

Ejaaz:
good at, which is social media.

Josh:
Yeah. I mean, it seems like it looks pretty good. This is certainly far from the frontier.

Josh:
And I'm starting to realize now through all of these releases,

Josh:
how difficult it is to compete at the frontier.

Josh:
It's just like, I mean, I think of Google, I think of Meta, I think of,

Josh:
spacex ai these are all incredible companies and they are putting all of their

Josh:
weight behind getting to this frontier

Josh:
and yet they're still having a difficult time of actually reaching it at the

Josh:
same rate that some other companies like anthropic and open ai are doing that

Josh:
said i mean this is a good model for what it is i love the idea that it has

Josh:
reasoning i think with open ai and their most recent image model that they they published the,

Josh:
novel and really exciting thing was that it had reasoning abilities baked in

Josh:
it didn't just take your text prompt at face value and generate an image.

Josh:
It actually thought about it.

Josh:
It works through the physics. It had this chain of thought that you kind of

Josh:
trace to get to a final image. And therefore the outputs were significantly better.

Josh:
This is another version of that where it's very smart. So I imagine we get some

Josh:
fun kind of like mobile based...

Josh:
Optimized features with this where it can recognize details and images really

Josh:
well it can perhaps like if you have

Josh:
for example on this image there is something sitting on the table you could

Josh:
swap out that element in particular i'm sure there's a lot of customization

Josh:
being built around this reasoning ability to understand what it's looking at

Josh:
and kind of reason through the images that you want

Josh:
and yeah overall pretty cool release um are we going to be using it is this

Josh:
something in the daily driver toolkit maybe thumbnail.

Ejaaz:
Creation no no why

Josh:
Would you do that when you got Chachi Petit image gen baby that's true or nano banana,

Josh:
like these are both just significantly better so there's no real use case for

Josh:
anyone who wants to generate images

Josh:
if you just have a $20 a month subscription anywhere else but it is cool to

Josh:
see more progress coming out of meta I mean we have brain wave reading and now

Josh:
we have image generating this week from them so they are pushing the needle forward.

Ejaaz:
We have two lost items on the docket and then we're going to round this episode

Ejaaz:
out since we're on the topic of image gen I hate to break it to you,

Ejaaz:
but there might be a replacement for GPT Image 2 coming out soon.

Ejaaz:
CDream from ByteDance, those are the owners and creators of TikTok,

Ejaaz:
if you didn't know, has come out with their first image model that competes

Ejaaz:
directly with GPT Image 2.

Ejaaz:
And honestly, if this demo is anything to go by, it is incredibly impressive,

Ejaaz:
but not because of the quality necessarily, but one for the cost.

Ejaaz:
It's super cheap to create and also really easy and intuitive to edit.

Ejaaz:
I mean, look at some of these things. Like I could create websites de novo from

Ejaaz:
scratch using some of these things. I could use different languages,

Ejaaz:
whatever I want. I could swap in animals for other types of animals.

Ejaaz:
I can go for a certain palette color.

Ejaaz:
It just seems like a creator or

Ejaaz:
designer's dream. Definitely one worth experimenting with and one that I'm

Ejaaz:
honestly excited to get my hands on

Josh:
Yeah this this one is really good i think anything that by dance releases has

Josh:
been like pretty impressive and this is no shortage the most interesting thing

Josh:
like you said is the ability to edit things quickly and to kind of workshop things to your

Josh:
own ability you can separate elements almost as if it's photoshop so if you're

Josh:
a designer who's been incredibly frustrated because you can't edit specific

Josh:
features this is the model for you you can now basically select any part of

Josh:
the image you want update it change it to however you'd like

Josh:
really powerful for customization so

Josh:
i'd say this probably is less for the average person more for the pro or the

Josh:
designer who wants to get a little bit more out of the image who wants a very specific output,

Josh:
very impressive overall.

Ejaaz:
And the final item, Cloudflare, which is not really a company that you hear

Ejaaz:
often because it's in the back end of the internet, has opened up a new monetization

Ejaaz:
gateway, a new payments API.

Ejaaz:
Now, if you operate any kind of website, it's likely that Cloudflare is the

Ejaaz:
guys behind it that is making sure there's no bots attacking you,

Ejaaz:
that there's no spam accounts, et cetera, et cetera, so they can govern visits of a website.

Ejaaz:
The reason why this is important is, let's say you create a cool bit of content.

Ejaaz:
Let's say you create an awesome video on limitless that, you know,

Ejaaz:
might be for paid subscribers in the future, you can now have an AI agent troll

Ejaaz:
this site and pay a little micropayment.

Ejaaz:
Typically, websites in the internet aren't built for this.

Ejaaz:
But with protocols like x402 from our friends over on the Web3 side of the world,

Ejaaz:
it enables micropayments.

Ejaaz:
So you can pay a couple of cents to get access to an article instead of having

Ejaaz:
to pay like a $100 per year subscription and stuff like that.

Ejaaz:
So the reason why I wanted to point this out is I thought it was cool.

Ejaaz:
I think it probably marks the open of a new type of economy which is agents

Ejaaz:
paying for stuff without you even knowing about it and having the means to do

Ejaaz:
so just thought it was worthy of an update

Josh:
Yeah i found it interesting how cloudflare uh they say 52 percent of crawler

Josh:
requests are now for ai training which is funny so half of the crawlers in the

Josh:
world are used just for training better models which is up from 22 percent in spring of 2025,

Josh:
um and now ai crawlers request content 100 to 10 000 times more than they refer

Josh:
traffic back so this is kind of

Josh:
built around that thesis that idea it's interesting it's cool i think um

Josh:
it's a testament to where things are to come we just had the cloud fair publication

Josh:
a few weeks ago that said the internet's now dead uh over half of the traffic

Josh:
is bought so this is a continuation of that okay well if half the

Josh:
internet traffic is bought let's build a payments gateway for them and that's

Josh:
exactly what this release is so just a continuing of the trend on this topic and with that.

Josh:
That is all for this week. You are fully caught up in the know with all things

Josh:
AI, frontier technology. This is our fourth episode of the week.

Josh:
If you missed any previous ones, go back and check them out.

Josh:
We had one about this company that we love, Etched.

Josh:
We had the Fable 5 Return. We had,

Josh:
ai finding all the trades that we missed over the last 200 episodes of recording

Josh:
which was a very fun episode so there's some good stuff for you to dig into

Josh:
this week if you haven't caught up if you have caught up

Josh:
go and enjoy the weekend touch grass it is an amazing weekend at least in new

Josh:
york it's looking sunny and beautiful i hope wherever you are the same is true

Josh:
and yeah if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to share it with a friend

Josh:
don't forget to rate us on your favorite podcast platform,

Josh:
he does any final parting thoughts before we head out.

Ejaaz:
I think the final thing to say is if you love our episodes, if you enjoy our

Ejaaz:
content, and if you would like to support us in any way, we are in the market for sponsors.

Ejaaz:
We're looking for companies and features and products that we're excited to

Ejaaz:
use and talk about to our audience of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

Ejaaz:
thousands of people per month.

Ejaaz:
So if that is you or if that is someone that you know that think might be them,

Ejaaz:
please let them know. Please send them a message. Send us a message.

Ejaaz:
We're available on X, on email, whatever. We'll leave it in the description below.

Ejaaz:
And yeah, hopefully speak to you

Ejaaz:
soon. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next one.

Josh:
See ya.