AlphaEvolve, AI's Highlight of the Year

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THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

Welcome back! In this insights rundown, we examine Apple’s and Anthropic’s new AI plans, CoreWeave's troubled public journey, and a personal reflection on the lameness of modern AI startups, among other insights.

But more importantly, we’ll focus on AlphaEvolve, the most exciting AI release not only in 2025, but maybe in years?

FRONTIER MODELS

Anthropic’s Upcoming Models Will “Think” A Lot

According to an exclusive by The Information, Anthropic is nearing the release of two models, new versions of Opus and Sonnet, to try to regain the lead it once held in the LLM arena.

According to the source, the key change will be the fact that, during inference, the model will be capable of backtracking and retrying to a much larger threshold than what is currently allowed for these models.

For example, if the model gets stuck with a tool failure (it tries to use a tool, but the tool returns an error), it will reflect on the error and try to self-correct.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

This exclusive article could have been a simple one-liner: Anthropic plans to release new models with much higher inference-time compute thresholds. In other words, if we recall that ‘reasoning models’ are just LLMs that:

Think for longer on a task

Approach problem-solving using multi-step thinking

And basically, if you’ll excuse my language, Anthorpic's new models will be levering the former to the tits. This is just another proof that modern progress is just naive compute increases, aka throwing all the compute we can at the same models that have existed for almost eight years.

There’s only one rule in AI right now: Want better model → Compute budget goes up → Model gets better.

While this is clearly beneficial and indicative of progress, I worry that this lack of real innovation will become a problem once these models run into the same ‘wall’ the previous scaling law (want better model → Train larger model → Results get better).

This release is probably caused by pressure from investors to deploy something fast, as Anthropic’s product shipping rate has fallen off a cliff compared to competing labs like OpenAI or Google, to the point of public embarrassment.

AI WRAPPERS

In AI, Ideas Are Worth Zero.

Are AI application startups, or dare I say AI wrappers, converging into the same company? That thought has been circling my mind recently based on how two ‘AI native’ companies, Granola and Notion, are basically merging into the same company.

Almost simultaneously, Granola launched a one-place wiki eerily similar to Notion… the day after Notion launched a meeting transcriptor AI (which is basically what Granola is).

This is just a small example, but I can’t help but realize that all AI startups look alike; they are all simply copying each other.

OpenAI is building a chat/coding IDE (acquired Windsurf)/Google competitor

Anthropic, Google, and xAI are building that same thing, too,

Anthropic led the way with Claude Code for terminal-based coding agents, which OpenAI followed with CodexCLI

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