Lots of News

New models, Employee Turnover, and Buck Rogers!

AI Humor

Dario, is that you?

Shirish wrote:

very few people know that Anthropic CEO played the role of Dan Melcher in the Silicon Valley.

Dan Melcher was played by actor Jake Broder, but the likeness was close enough that it made me laugh.

That’s a lot of water

The Jenkins wrote:

Mythos is Amazing!

Zack Korman wrote:

Palm AI

Maddie D. Reese wrote:

You do NOT need $15,000 worth of hardware to run a local model.
You need a 2005 Palm Tungsten E2 PDA (which you can purchase at your local thrift store for $10.81 including tax). It has 26 MB of available storage, obviously plenty.
Here’s an example of the output. I haven’t benchmarked it yet but it appears to be Fable-equivalent.

Okay, it’s not hilariously funny, but I worked at Palm when this model was released and back then it really was bleeding edge. We were all excited about the company’s future and then Handspring released the Treo, but that’s a different story.

Gold master released to manufacturing

Ali Grids wrote:

If Claude Code dropped in 2010:

New Models Gossip

Every day brings new rumors. Here are some that I have spotted:

Chetaslua wrote:

We already tested 5.6 pro a lot ( this model is special like with right prompt it can do anything)
GPT-Bidi-1 is what we were asking since gpt4o era it has august 2025 knowledge cut off

Gpt-5.6 other models were tested as kindle alpha but we expect new checkpointsi

Bidi -1 is Good

If you click this link, from AI News|TestingCatalog, you can hear samples of OpenAI’s new voice model named Bidi-1. Bidi stands for bi-directional signaling the model’s ability to interrupt (or be interrupted) by the human while still keeping track of the conversation’s flow.

AILeaks|Token Gremlin wrote:

I’m genuinely impressed by what I’ve seen from ChatGPT’s new voice model.
This thing literally interrupts you, breathes, laughs, talks over you, corrects you, and somehow feels more natural than 90% of the call center agents we’ve all gotten used to dealing with.

Bidi to Them, Twiki to Me

Before we move on, I do need to comment on the name Bidi-1. Once you understand it stands for bidirectional it makes sense, but that will never stop me from thinking they are talking about Twiki from Buck Rogers.

Improved GPT

Lumina wrote:

OpenAI just leaked GPT 5.6 with a 1.5 million token context window
The leaks for GPT 5.6 point to some serious upgrades:
· 1.5 million token context window
· Much stronger long horizon coding and multi-hour
agent workflows
· One prompt generation of clean, production ready websites and apps
· Faster responses + better overall efficiency
Expected to drop late June. This looks like one of the bigger leaps in a while.

Programmer Humor wrote:

New Gemini Pro Model Incoming

Salio wrote:

Gemini 3.5 Pro leak 👀: it will be released this week
Google said Gemini 3.5 Pro would arrive in June after delaying it at I/O, and all signs are pointing to a launch this week.
What to expect:
> Major coding improvements
> Better agent workflows
> Stronger UI and frontend generation
> 2M+ context window
> More aggressive pricing than GPT-5.5 and Fable 5
The timing is interesting

Sonnet 5

Lumina wrote:

New Claude Sonnet 5 leak just surfaced
Anthropic appears to be prepping the next Sonnet model:
· Internal codename from earlier leaks: Fennec
· Expected as early as next week
· Expect strong coding performance, speed, and better price/performance than Opus/Fable
· 1M token context window

There are rumors that this is being tested by some enterprise customers right now. Release does seem imminent.

Maybe Not Yet?

Yesterday, leo wrote:

- GPT-5.6 has been delayed and will no longer release this week. New target is ~mid-July.
- DeepMind are not satisfied with the current state of 3.5 Pro and it will no longer launch this month.
- Preparations for the launch of Bidi, OpenAI's new voice model, are underway in ChatGPT and we could see it available as soon as this week.
- Claude Sonnet 5 is currently available for select enterprise customers under an Early Access Program and is seen as a stop-gap as progress on getting Mythos/Fable 5 back out have stalled.

Employee Turnover

Noam Shazeer wrote:

I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.

It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.

This one has to hurt. Noam Shazeer was one of the eight Google researchers who co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture. Transformers are the core technology behind most modern large language models. It’s the tech that makes today’s generative AI boom possible. The paper was not the beginning of AI, and not all AI systems use transformers, but it is one of the foundational breakthroughs behind our current era.

John Jumper wrote:

A bit of news: After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge). I am incredibly grateful for my time at GDM.

Demis Hassabis took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science. GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.

John Jumper was one of the Google DeepMind scientists awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, an AI system that dramatically advanced protein structure prediction.

If you haven’t yet read The Infinity Machine (it’s a biography about Demis Hassabis that covers the AlphaFold era among many other meaningful moments, I recommend Babbage’s article because it will give you a great overview and share some observations as well. Obviously, you should read the book, but if you’re pressed for time, Babbage has you covered:

The Infinity Man

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