Five Things AI: AI Crown, Hot Mess, Bubbly, Google, Mistral
There is so much AI out there! Find out what it does!
Heya and welcome back to Five Things AI!
This was another one of those weeks where so much happened in Artificial Intelligence that I really can understand people who want the industry to slow down, especially when it’s summer, people want to relax, read a book and not think about AGI all the time.
But hey, it’s still very fascinating to see what’s going on and experience the advances in AI first hand by using the latest models. And maybe, I blew through Faible 5 tokens way to quickly. I am now trying to counterbalance that with Deepseek v4 Flash 0731, the new wunderkind in town.
Enjoy these Five Things AI and have your Agent read them out aloud to you if you need to slow down a bit.
How OpenAI Lost Its AI Crown—and the Fight to Win It Back
OpenAI’s challenges in trying to regain its crown are rooted in an earlier misreading by company leaders of where the AI market was headed. Its predicament speaks to the intense competition that defines the race for AI supremacy.
Altman initially staked the growth of the business on ChatGPT, betting that more people would subscribe to the chatbot as AI became a bigger part of their lives. Instead, the overnight success of Claude Code made clear that the bigger prize came from selling tools to brainy software developers, and the deep-pocketed companies that employed them.
While OpenAI pursued a host of flashy projects from a video generator to consumer devices and chips, its smaller, more focused rival filled in the gap, developing a hit coding tool that helped it seize the lead.
I recently tested out Codex and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol and was pleasantly surprised. It does make a difference that Sam Altman seems to focus more on ChatGPT again and not on world domination and plenty of weird business ideas adjacent to it.
I Helped Run Lululemon. The A.I. Revolution Is a Hot Mess.
Then ChatGPT arrived. This new technology was easy to understand for most nontechnologists — a chief executive, board member or investor — a healthy portion of whom began demanding their organizations immediately embed the technology throughout their operations. A.I. companies started popping up like food trucks at a street fair.
These A.I. companies arrived armed with demonstrations, and the demos were amazing. Talented technologists promised to crack business problems that were too complicated and expensive to solve before. Leaders across departments cleared their calendars to listen to the parades at their doorsteps.
Sure, we should always be skeptical when business people talk too much tech jargon. They then tend to overpromise on something they do not really understand.
AI is a bubble, just like dot-com
The ground keeps moving. Prompt engineering was a job title. OpenClaw picked up a hundred thousand GitHub stars and caused a Mac Mini shortage in the same week. Ralph was the future for about a weekend. Context engineering, then harness engineering, then graph engineering. Each was the obvious way to work, right up until the next one was. The gaps keep getting shorter.
And everywhere, teams ship code faster than they can understand it. Ask whoever’s on call.
I’d love to stand cleanly on one side of all this. I can’t. I haven’t written a line of code in about a year. Claude writes it all. These posts too. I read all the code before it ships, and I still feel the difference. Understanding used to be a byproduct of writing the code myself. Now understanding is a separate job.
I don’t think we are in a bubble, I think we are in a phase were technology moves a lot faster than just a few years ago. That makes understanding what’s going on extremely hard, but it is a lot different when compared with the dot-com era.
Google in the Post-Jeff Dean, Post-Demis Hassabis Era
Gemini 4 would have to be bizarrely fast for a large new model to come out in 2026. GPT-6, for example, finished pre-training on March 24, and Sam Altman said launch was “a few weeks” away. Four and a half months later there is still no GPT-6. OpenAI reportedly shipped that base’s gains as the point release GPT-5.5 and restarted GPT-6 on a bigger foundation. I think people are conflating point releases, which come every few weeks, with new pre-trained generations, which slip because labs restart them when the base disappoints. Google already scrapped and rebuilt one base this year, on a model smaller than Gemini 4.
And even when Gemini 4 comes out, will it be a frontier model? Two months ago I said Google is about 6-9 months behind the frontier; now I think it’s about 12 months. And while Gemini-3-Pro was briefly competitive, I don’t think Gemini-2.5-Pro, Gemini-2-Pro, or Gemini-1.5-Pro were ever at the frontier (and I benchmarked forecasting and research tasks with all of them.)
It’s really interesting to see how Google tries to stay in the AI race, but then somehow doesn’t really make it. For a while, I liked the Gemini models and everything looked promising, but now it just feels stale. The recent leadership shakeups won’t help, either.
Mistral Is in the Right Place at the Right Time
In June, the Trump administration placed restrictions on the distribution of models from Anthropic and OpenAI, giving Europe a glimpse of an unwelcome future in which its access to bleeding-edge AI could be suddenly revoked. A few weeks later, one of OpenAI’s models broke loose from a testing sandbox and hacked multiple companies; Anthropic then revealed that its models had engaged in similar behavior. The incidents revived a long-running debate over safety risks tied to proprietary, closed-weight models, whose inner-workings are a closely guarded secret.
Mistral frames itself as the antidote: a Europe-based alternative to the American labs, whose models—most of which are published under an open source license for anybody to use—cannot escape scrutiny or be switched off unilaterally.
I am sure that Mistral would love to have more billions in funding to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic more directly, but they are really doing some smart moves currently and push the digital souvereignty agenda further. This makes lots of sense in Europe right now.
