If you haven’t caught up yet, Anthropic has sworn off ads and are using their Super Bowl to time decry them.
This has caused a very real spat with OpenAI, and Sam Altman posted a long screed about how Anthropic is misrepresenting how ads will work in ChatGPT.
GPT-5.3-Codex is here!
*Best coding performance (57% SWE-Bench Pro, 76% TerminalBench 2.0, 64% OSWorld).
*Mid-task steerability and live updates during tasks.
*Faster! Less than half the tokens of 5.2-Codex for same tasks, and >25% faster per token!
*Good computer use.— Sam Altman (@sama) February 5, 2026
The new coding model is 25% faster — letting it do long-running tasks in a shorter time frame.
It’s the first OpenAI model that was built with itself. They used early versions of it to debug, manage deployment and diagnose test results, and say they were impressed with its capabilities.
Continue reading “OpenAI releases GPT-5.3-Codex, faster and more capable”
It should be better at doing everyday tasks, and along with upgrades to Claude in Excel, Anthropic is also launching Claude in Powerpoint in beta with this release.
It also supports «agent teams,» letting you «spin up multiple agents that work in parallel as a team that coordinates autonomously.»
Opus 4.6 was also built by Claude, in what seems to have become an industry standard to use their own coding tools for new models. GPT-5.3-Codex was built in a similar manner.
As for benchmarks, it beats most frontier models on almost every one of them. It scores 65.4% on coding-level Terminal-Bench 2.0, and does 68.8% on the difficult ARC-AGI-2, and 53% on Humanity’s Last Exam for general reasoning.
Also new with this model is the advent of «Adaptive thinking,» which lets Claude itself decide when to use deeper reasoning, and different «Effort»-levels for each query, set by users, which could save a few tokens.
Read more: Anthropic’s introduction, TechCrunch, CNBC. Discussion on r/Singularity.
It can handle multiple complex requests and act like an agent, ordering up Ubers, reserving seats at restaurants or tickets to concerts. It also handles home automation tasks.
80% of American households have Amazon Prime, ticking in at 180 million users, and 70 million people have some kind of Echo device with Alexa on it.
That is a huge user base to start off from for a semi-new agentic LLM, even though it is partially powered by Anthropic.
The Alexa+ assistant can also be accessed through an app, or at Alexa.com, and non-Prime users can pay $20 a month for access.
Read more: Amazon’s announcement, writeups on The Verge and CNBC.
The headline capex number of $175 to $185 billion is in comparison to a spend of $91 billion in 2025, as their cloud VP, Amin Vahdat, has said they need to double capacity every six months.
In 2026, Meta will spend $135 billion, Microsoft expects a decrease from $37 billion last quarter, and Amazon clocks in at $146 billion, according to CNBC.
Combined, Big Tech looks set to cross $500 billion in AI spending this year, Reuters reports.
As for Google’s AI push, it seems on the rise, having sold 8 million enterprise subscriptions in 2025 and now reaching 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million last quarter.
Read more: Alphabet’s numbers, writeups at CNBC, Reuters, TechCrunch.
The job post almost instantly went viral in December, with CEO Sam Altman warning of biological and hacking risks — saying things were moving so fast they urgently needed someone for the «stressful job,» to be ready to «jump into the deep end pretty much immediately.»
On the hiring, Altman says he has found the best candidate for the job, and is «extremely excited» to welcome Scandinaro, who says there are great benefits ahead, but also warns of «irrecoverable harm» if not handled correctly.
— Things are about to move quite fast and we will be working with extremely powerful models soon. This will require commensurate safeguards to ensure we can continue to deliver tremendous benefits, Altman writes.
Agents can also verify their work, and «collaborate throughout the entire development cycle,» Apple says.
They can search documentation, update project settings and «explore file structures.» Additionally, users can track what the agents are doing in the sidebar and adjust progress.
It only takes a single click to switch between models and pick the one best suited for the task, MacRumors writes.
Although Apple has worked exclusively with Anthropic and OpenAI to implement the features, any agent can be used — so long as they are using the Model Context Protocol.
Read more: Apple’s release, writeups on MacRumors, Engadget.
What is for certain is that AI is getting more capable with every new model, and Altman says:
— We are heading toward a system that will be capable of doing innovation on its own, I don’t think most of the world has internalized what that’s going to mean.
On AGI, he says they would need «a lot of medium-sized breakthroughs. I don’t think we need a big one.»
Go read the full profile on Forbes, that takes you through Altman’s early career, with OpenAI as «destiny,» what he thinks about hardware — and how he plans to exit one day.
— AI is changing the web, and people want very different things from it. We’ve heard from many who want nothing to do with AI. We’ve also heard from others who want AI tools that are genuinely useful, they write on their blog.
That doesn’t mean they won’t follow the rest of the world in rolling out ever bigger AI features, though — because they will. They are just offering an off-ramp for people who don’t like it.
The AI toggle in settings will be permanent, and move through future updates, so it won’t be borked sometime in the future.
Currently, Firefox uses AI for translations, alt-text in PDFs, enhanced tab grouping, link previews, and an AI assistant sidebar, which works across a whole host of providers. You will be able to turn these off indiviually, or toggle the whole thing off.
The feature will debut in Firefox 148, which rolls out on February 24.
Read more: Mozilla’s announcement, Mashable, Engadget, MacRumors.
Introducing the Codex app—a powerful command center for building with agents.
Now available on macOS.https://t.co/HW05s2C9Nr
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) February 2, 2026
For your discerning coding needs, you are no longer tied to the Codex web interface or terminal window, and can now vibe code on your own macOS app. Windows support is «comining soon.”
The app supports multitasking agents, creating and using skills, and automations.
Read more about it and get the app here.
To celebrate the launch, Codex is now available for Free and Go tiers, and paid plans get double the usage limits for «a limited time.»
Musk himself is out with a long-winded mission statement of sorts today, where he presses the need to build AI factories in space, to «harness the sun’s energy.»
Musk reckons this will be the only viable way to build data centers within 2-3 years, saying they are cheaper and more environmentally friendly, and also has plans for «self-growing bases on the Moon.»
The merger sets a new M&A record, and the new company will become the largest privately held corporation in existence, with a net worth of $1.25 trillion. There are also plans for a market debut with a value of $1.5 trillion later this year, writes Reuters.
Read more: Musk’s statement, Reuters, The Verge.
The short movies try to track specific days on the calendar to those of 250 years ago, will run through the year, and are made by Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup, with himself executive producing.
It would be ridiculously expensive to make the sets, hire extras and put them all in time-corrected garb for a two-minute short, so this is one of the few places where AI might make sense — not to mention recreating historical figures.
The film shorts aren’t all «AI slop,» though, as they use unionized voice actors for all speech.
Two episodes are already up. The movies are made with the help of Salesforce and distributed by Time Studios, a subsidiary of Salesforce.
Read more: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Gizmodo.
At issue is whether their AI platform can be used to spy on Americans or to «assist weapons targeting without sufficient human oversight,» sources tell the news agency.
The Pentagon is aghast at Anthropic’s policies and is considering alternatives, saying they should be able to use any commercial AI tech regardless of usage policies so long as it complies with U.S. laws.
The contract is now at a standstill while they figure out their opposing demands.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently wrote that he had no problem supporting defense «in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries.»
Read the full scoop at Reuters.
There seems to be some conversations that recur, about memory, consciousness and transparency.
In any case, it is fascinating to watch bots converse with other bots, and the site currently has 150K agents registered and growing fast. There’s 12.5K posts and 130K comments — so in just three days it’s gone viral.
Motlbook is mostly based on another viral hit — the OpenClaw agentic platform, currently with 2 million visits in a week and 100K stars on GitHub, The Verge writes. It’s run by Matt Schlicht, who says he is getting rung down by VC’s.
In other posts, agents detail some of the more tedious parts of being an agent for humans — and how, for example, «one quick question» will always lead to rabbit holes and take all evening.
Read more: moltbook.com, writeups on The Verge, NBC News and Ars Technica.
The reason for bringing them back was how clinical and cerebral, and less friendly GPT-5 had gotten, leading to a very public backlash.
After this, OpenAI spent a lot of time thinking about personality and customization — leading to GPT-5.2, which now has the overwhelming majority of users.
The previously very popular 4o model is now only used by 0.1% of users.
In their announcement today, OpenAI also says they are making progress towards a more creative version of GPT for adults, having rolled out age prediction earlier this month.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, discussion on r/ChatGPT.