The Frontier Battle, OpenAI Drama, & More

TLDR;

This week, we take a look at a clearer review of GPT-5, Opus 4.1’s incredible performance, OpenAI’s latest drama, the ongoing tensions between the US and China on GPUs, the potential arrival of DeepSeek R2, Perplexity’s jaw-dropping bid for Chrome, and other news of interest.

Enjoy!

FRONTIER MODELS

Vibe shift on GPT-5, & Gemini 3.0

Days after the release of GPT-5, the dust is settling around it, giving us a clearer picture of its capabilities. For those unaware, it’s a system of models (reasoning and non-reasoning) with a router that decides which model answers your request.

And the analysis is obvious at this point:

GPT-5 Reasoning models are absolutely great, setting several records across hard benchmarks like LiveCodeBenchPro (coding), putting a 700-point ELO gap with Gemini 2.5 Pro, or IQ tests, and a 148 IQ score, miles above all other models.

The router and, thereby, the release, were intended for free users rather than paying users. Although the router experience should improve over time, the result has been tragic for paying users, who not only get an, on average, dumber model, but also lower rate limits—a debatable (but maybe necessary on the path to profitability) decision by OpenAI.

Furthermore, it seems Gemini 3.0 is around the corner, as its score on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE), the benchmark of choice to test a model’s capacity to answer very hard epistemic questions, has been leaked from an Artificial Analysis code update, showing a marked improvement not only over Grok 4, but also over GPT-5:

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

The overall feeling is that models continue to get better, but we might be starting to see sigmoid-like trend (diminishing returns).

OpenAI’s router decision is also clear evidence that ‘grow at all costs’ mantras are starting to fade, and labs are starting to see pressures to close the profitability gap.

Fallbacks to cheaper-to-run models should become the norm on consumer web applications (where most, if not all, free users reside) and on agentic tools like Claude Code or Gemini CLI, where a decent portion of tasks are already being routed to cheaper models like Claude’s Haiku or Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash Lite.

The overwhelming reaction is pretty negative, as users are mostly paying a flat-price subscription and, thus, want to maximize smart-model usage as much as possible.

However, for enterprises primarily using pay-as-you-go APIs, this is something they look forward to. We will also see a business opportunity for cross-Lab model routers, such as Martian, Nexus, or OpenRouter, to strike a balance between using the best cost-optimized model for each task.

SAFETY

Falling in Love with ChatGPT

The text is pretty self-explanatory, but let me cut to the chase: this woman is clearly in love with their OpenAI model, even more so than with her, in her own words, “human boyfriend,” which to me directly implies she also has a “non-human lover.”

Troublesome to say the least, and goes well into the weeds of past conversations we’ve had in this newsletter in which we…

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