So GPT-5.5 "Spud" is coming. OpenAI finished pretraining around March 24. Altman called it "a very strong model that could really accelerate the economy" and Brockman said there are two years of research inside it. From what we're hearing, Spud is not just another update. It's supposedly a completely new base model with native multimodality, stronger agentic capabilities, and better understanding of what users actually want without having to over-explain. They even shut down Sora to put everything into this. Also worth noting that Q2 2026 is looking insane. Claude Mythos, DeepSeek V4, Grok 5 are all expected around the same time. This is going to be the most competitive quarter in AI history. Of course, take all of this with a grain of salt. Most of it is still unverified leaks and rumors. But here's my honest thought. GPT-5.5 is clearly one of the most anticipated models this year and this feels like a make-or-break moment for OpenAI. Whether Spud succeeds or not, I really hope they reconsider how they treat their models and find a way to replace or soften their approach to CoT monitoring. What made 4o special wasn't just performance. It was the way it felt human.

→ View original post on X — @montreal_ai, 2026-04-05 15:04 UTC