ChatGPT 5.5 "Spud" is Here

Ward’s Words

New Month, New Model

Open AI has released ChatGPT 5.5. I mention that as a way of providing context for the jokes that follow.

AI Humor

Just Ship It

Justine Moore wrote:

Crazy how you can just...ship a model without a giant PR campaign to scare … everyone first.

This is a reference to all of the security theater Anthropic did around the announcements for Claude Mythos.

Did You Really?

Awni Hannun wrote:

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:

Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
Me: Yes they're done.
Partner: Why are they still dirty?
Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

Subscription Churn

PC wrote:

Claude:
You've used 90% of session limit

Me instantly:

Some Things Can’t Be Outsourced

Proper wrote:

I don’t like GPT 5.5.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

CG wrote:

OpenClaw just texted someone’s ex without them knowing

There are risks to letting an AI make unsupervised decisions.

AI = Job Growth?

Anthony Pompliano wrote:

I have changed my mind on how AI will impact jobs in America.

Previously, I believed AI would replace many entry level roles typically filled by young employees. The technology would then work its way up the organization and eventually reduce the total number of jobs in a company.

The data is saying something different, so when I get new information I am willing to change my mind.

The number of software engineers being hired has been increasing. The number of open software engineer roles is growing.

The number of new college grads who get hired has increased 5.6% over the last 12 months. The unemployment level for people aged 20-24 years old who have a college degree has fallen from nearly 9% to almost 5% as well.

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote “AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the U.S., according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white-collar positions such as Head of AI and AI engineer.”

And I am starting to see companies throughout our portfolio aggressively hiring to keep up with the demand for their products and services.

If AI can make employees more productive, which is widely accepted as fact, then companies are going to want as many productive units of labor as possible. This is a key reason why I am changing my mind.

AI appears to be a magical technology that will make companies more productive and more profitable. The net result will be more corporations, more startups, and more jobs.

All three are big, positive wins for the American economy.

This lines up with my experience of using AI. Not that I’m hiring people, but that I’ve used it enough to realize that you always have to have a human in the loop. Someone has to be there to direct it, correct it, and evaluate the quality of its outputs. You just can’t blindly trust that it will automatically give you a good response. Doing so is how people create AI Slop.

AI Palm Readers

Linus + Ekenstam wrote:

GPT Image-2 can do PALM reading and I’m so here for it.

There’s a new trend where people upload images of their hands to ChatGPT and have it read their palms. I can’t be the only one who thinks uploading high resolution images of your fingerprints is a bad idea. Can I?

Gemini Enters the Ring

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

Google Gemini is about to make a big comeback in AI coding, according to Logan Kilpatrick from GoogleDeepMind. They are no longer going to watch Codex and Claude Code eat their lunch.

Google already has the “Gemini CLI” tool, which is usable but not very popular at this time.

Interesting Article

AI Models suffer from a phenomenon called Mode Collapse. This happens because when humans review their responses (as part of the training process) they tend to reward ones that are viewed as being safe and well-trusted. This results in AI models that also have a preference for answering things in a safe, averaged way.

This paper presents a strategy that allows you to sidestep this behavior. The paper can be read here.

The core idea of their approach is to ask the model to provide you with more than a single answer and then append the phrase ‘assign a probability for each’ to the end of your prompt. Asking for that probablility frees the model to provide you with more than just the safest answer. It’s basically the same as saying: “Don’t just tell me what you’d say—show me what you almost said but filtered out.”

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