GPT-5.4, Oracle Layoffs?, & AI Fly Brains

TLDR;

Welcome back! Today, we are once again packed with insights, from model releases like GPT-5.4 and the incredible UNI-1 from Luma, research that shows how AIs can’t control their own “thoughts”, how scientists have replicated a fly brain, Oracle’s ongoing debt problems that might lead to thousands of layoffs, ChatGPT for Excel, and a beautiful piece of research that might change how models are served to users, and more.

Enjoy!

THEWHITEBOX

GPT-5.4 is out, a new flagship from OpenAI

OpenAI has finally released GPT-5.4. It’s positioned as its “most capable and efficient frontier model for professional work,” and the launch spans ChatGPT, the API, and Codex, with a separate GPT-5.4 Pro tier for maximum performance on harder tasks.

The biggest emphasis is on professional knowledge work. OpenAI highlights stronger performance on tasks like slide decks, spreadsheets, documents, legal analysis, financial modeling, and long-horizon deliverables.

The three main themes of this release are computer-use agents, larger context windows, and hallucinations.

OpenAI says GPT-5.4 is its first general-purpose model with native state-of-the-art computer-use capabilities, meant to let agents operate computers and complete workflows across applications.

It also stresses the very large context window, about 1.05 million tokens (~750,000 words), which it presents as important for planning, executing, and verifying long multi-step tasks.

They also push reliability and factuality. The release page says GPT-5.4 is their “most factual model yet,” with individual claims 33% less likely to be false and full responses 18% less likely to contain any errors than GPT-5.2 on a set of flagged factual-error prompts.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

From my first interactions with it, it’s a very good model. It’s faster, understands nuances better, and, much like the new GPT-5.3 Instant, isn’t as literal as previous models (meaning they were too eager to correct the slightest of mistakes to an undesirable extreme).

They do have a nice new feature that lets them declare their intent back to you. Before, once you asked them for something and they started “thinking”, you really didn’t know what they were doing. Now, before thinking, they declare what they are going to do:

And no, no ‘extreme thinking mode’, meaning The Information was, once again, not accurate

In other words, it’s much more communicative during its long thinking runs, which immediately improves customer experience.

Furthermore, although I haven’t put it to the test myself, some renowned mathematicians are swearing this model is extremely impressive, to the point that some are saying it feels like their personal “move 37”, or even more.

This is a reference to the famous move 37 in a Go game between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol a few years ago, which many claim was the first example in history of an AI being genuinely creative (we even had documentaries about it). The move made no sense at all at first, shocking everyone, including Lee, who even left the room for a while, but it turned out to be a great one that no human in history would have made. Here’s the move…

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