Playing Dirty, the Mythos Lie, & Prices 🆙

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week, we have several insights to discuss, from Mythos’ cybersecurity concerns being fully disproven, OpenAI’s problems with goblins, the “new” technique Labs are using to charge more, Hyperscalers earnings results, and the proof that price hikes are coming in a pretty strong way, among other news.

Enjoy!

🥳Announcement🥳

I’m starting an enterprise AI-focused free blog on Medium and Substack called The Imperative, where you can read my first blog, Diary of a Scared Executive.

It’s an advisory firm, meaning you can hire me for enterprise advisory through there, but it will also serve as a free blog where I share insights from actual field data, after talking with executives and practitioners alike, to show you the true state of enterprise AI. This means non-enterprise content will be found here and in my Medium blog, and enterprise AI content will focus mostly on The Imperative.

Don’t hesitate to follow me on your platform of choice!

CYBERSECURITY

GPT-5.5 Seems to be as “Dangerous” as Mythos

The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) announced that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 is the second frontier model (after Anthropic’s Mythos Preview) to fully complete a complex 32-step corporate network attack simulation.

In the “The Last Ones” cyber range, a realistic enterprise network with multiple subnets, GPT-5.5 succeeded in 2 out of 10 attempts with a 100 million-token budget.

It also scored the highest on advanced CTF challenges, achieving ~71% success rate on expert-level tasks involving memory exploits, cryptography, and reverse engineering.

As a notable result, GPT-5.5 solved a difficult Rust virtual machine reverse-engineering challenge in under 11 minutes and for just $1.73, a task that took a human expert roughly 12 hours.

It’s important to note the caveats, though; these tests were run in controlled environments with no active defenders or real security tools. That is, real-world performance against defended networks remains unproven.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

It’s been several days since the release of GPT-5.5, and to my knowledge, the world hasn’t ended yet despite having similar cybersecurity capabilities as the model that was “too powerful to be released.”

Remember that a few years ago, OpenAI believed GPT-2 was too dangerous to release. Please stop taking seriously companies that are incentivized to scare you and investors in order to raise more money.

RESEARCH

GPT’s Weird Obsession with Goblins

One of the most viral moments of the week has been the weird obsession OpenAI models have with creature-like words like ‘gremlin’ or ‘goblin’. The models simply can’t get enough of talking about these entities, especially when users chose the ‘Nerdy’ personality option OpenAI offers in its products, as shown in the thumbnail.

OpenAI eventually realized and has even completely retired the ‘Nerdy’ personality.

But how does this happen? How does a model become obsessed with a word? Let me explain why this apparently harmless event shows us how incredibly feeble AI training techniques are and how this can manifest in much more harmful behaviors.

At a very high level, every model released to users follows a three-step…

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