“AI #166: Google Sells Out” by Zvi

This was the week of GPT-5.5. It is an excellent model, sir, and OpenAI is competitive with Anthropic's top public offering for the first time since late last year. As usual, I did coverage of the System Card, and then of Capabilities and Reactions. DeepSeek gave us the long-awaited v4. DeepSeek has given us another strong feat of engineering efficiency for 1M context. That is impressive, and there will be those who build upon v4 and put it to good use. But this is not a frontier model, nor a DeepSeek moment, nor a key step to proto-AGI or anything like that. Compute constraints bind, and have forced DeepSeek to focus on efficiency. Let us keep it that way. Talkie is the other release, an old timey AI trained on text from before 1931. Fun stuff. Google signed a contract with the Department of War that not only agrees to ‘all lawful use’ with no functional exceptions whatsoever, it also agreed to modify or remove any safety barriers upon request. They did this under no deadline or pressure. Whatever you think of OpenAI's actions in this matter, Google's were far worse. Anthropic continues to [...] ---Outline:(02:03) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility(02:34) Language Models Dont Offer Mundane Utility(06:50) Seeking Deeply(18:54) Huh, Upgrades(19:30) On Your Marks(19:48) Choose Your Fighter(20:52) More On Claude Opus 4.7(22:54) Goblin Mode (More on GPT-5.5)(31:23) Fun With Media Generation(32:07) They Took Our Jobs(34:46) Get Involved(35:49) Introducing(36:38) In Other AI News(37:29) Show Me the Money(37:59) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble(39:05) The Art of the Deal(40:09) Quiet Speculations(41:33) And Hes Gone(43:01) The Quest for Sane Regulations(43:31) Distillation(46:12) If You Want A Good Future You Must Steer It(53:50) Chip City(54:50) The Mask Comes Off(01:08:45) People Just Say Principles(01:12:49) Greetings From The Department of War(01:19:14) Greetings From Project Glasswing(01:24:38) The Week in Audio(01:26:25) People Just Say Things(01:30:09) People Just Publish Things(01:30:32) Rhetorical Innovation(01:34:53) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult(01:38:49) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone(01:45:12) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone(01:46:21) The Lighter Side --- First published: April 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zGyzyJJkTxbhReZP7/ai-166-google-sells-out --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.