The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - ChatGPT 5.5 Coming Soon?
Episode Date: January 15, 2026The AI rumor mill is heating up again, with fresh speculation about when OpenAI’s next major model might land and whether it could reset the competitive narrative after a turbulent few months of lau...nches. The episode puts those rumors in context, tracing how momentum has shifted between OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, and what a real step-change model would need to accomplish. In the headlines: Microsoft moves to defuse political backlash over data center power costs, chip geopolitics tighten around NVIDIA and China, OpenAI makes a small but telling health-tech acquisition, and new model rumors swirl from DeepSeek, Google, and Anthropic.Brought to you by:KPMG – Discover how AI is transforming possibility into reality. Tune into the new KPMG 'You Can with AI' podcast and unlock insights that will inform smarter decisions inside your enterprise. Listen now and start shaping your future with every episode. https://www.kpmg.us/AIpodcastsZencoder - From vibe coding to AI-first engineering - http://zencoder.ai/zenflowOptimizely Opal - The agent orchestration platform build for marketers - https://www.optimizely.com/theaidailybriefAssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - https://www.assemblyai.com/briefLandfallIP - AI to Navigate the Patent Process - https://landfallip.com/Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, what the AI rumor mill says about when we might get the next big model.
And before that in the headlines, Microsoft coming in hot with some plans to make people less mad about data centers and electricity.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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AI news you need in around five minutes.
2026 is an election year, and it's been clear for some time that AI was going to find
its way into the political discourse.
The odds-on bet for how it does make it there is less about AI itself, although there's
plenty of issues that people have, and more about the broader theme, which is very clearly
going to dominate this election cycle, which is affordability.
In short, to the extent that data centers are perceived to be a contributor to higher cost
of living for Americans, those data centers and the larger AI industry are going to have a not-so-fun
time politically. Indeed, as he goes after a number of different affordability issues, Donald Trump
has turned his attention and his truth social account on this particular one as well.
On Monday, he wrote, I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers.
Therefore, my administration is working with major American technology companies to secure their
commitment to the American people, and we will have much to announce in the coming weeks.
First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes
beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption
in the form of paying higher utility bills. We are the hottest country in the world at number
one in AI. Data centers are key to that boom and keeping Americans free and secure, but the big
technology companies who build them must pay their own way. Thank you and congratulations to Microsoft.
More to come soon. Now, it is way beyond the scope of this headlines episode to get into
the full complexity of why electricity costs are up and what percentage,
of it is actually from AI, but frankly, I think all of those are completely losing political
arguments, and all that matters is basically exactly what President Trump is getting at here,
which is the perception of whether the big companies are not only picking up the tab for themselves,
but perhaps even paying a little bit more to try to make this viable for everyone else.
Now, people have been talking about this type of policy for a while.
Investor Chamath Palahapatia started tweeting about it somewhere in the middle of last year
and kept it up throughout the fall, for example, in October writing,
the hyperscaler should take the electricity cost of local residents to zero and start buying goodwill.
Otherwise, I expect more local communities to push back on these data centers, which will
complicate the AI buildout that needs to happen.
So what did Microsoft actually announce?
In a blog post on Tuesday from Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, the company wrote about a five-part
plan to build what they're calling community-first AI infrastructure.
They write that the plan commits them to concrete steps needed to be a good neighbor in the
communities where they build own and operate their data centers.
So what are the five parts of their plan?
The first is that they'll pay their own way to ensure their data centers don't increase
other people's electricity prices.
Basically, they say they're going to pay utility rates that are high enough to cover their
electricity costs and make sure it doesn't get passed on to the communities in which they're
operating.
Pillar 2 is they commit to trying to minimize their water use and replenish even more of the
communities water than they use.
Pillar 3 is to create jobs for residents.
Pillar 4 is to add to the tax base to fund local hospital, schools, parks, and libraries.
And pillar 5 is to strengthen the community by investing in local AI training and non-profits.
Now, it's totally easy to be cynical about any corporate initiative like this, but for my money,
this is exactly the type of thing that needs to happen from all of the big tech companies who are in
the midst of this infrastructure buildout.
Frankly, I think it's a complete own goal that with something like this, where there is so
much opportunity for these data centers to actually be good for the communities that they're in,
that we have completely missed that boat until now.
I'm glad to see Microsoft taking this on, and frankly, I think they can go even farther.
I think Shemath is right.
I think they should be going way beyond just paying their own share.
and frankly just buying the goodwill of the community that they're in.
Ultimately, that is such a small fraction of the cost of these data centers,
that doing it, to me, just seems like a no-brainer.
Still, this is good progress,
and I want to encourage Microsoft and everyone else in a similar space
to double down on this type of initiative.
Now, moving over to a story that has been up and down and over and under
and never quite clear.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Chinese customs officials have told customs agents
that Nvidia's H-200 chips are not permitted to enter the country.
Their sources said that tech companies were also summoned to meetings where they were explicitly told not to order chips unless necessary.
One of the Reuter sources commented,
The wording from the officials is so severe that it is basically a ban for now,
though this might change in the future should things evolve.
Now, the information has a slightly different sourcing on the story,
who said that the directive from Beijing was, quote, deliberately vague.
They said that the imports were limited to special circumstances,
which included university research and R&D.
Both reports used the word necessary to describe the limitations,
but the difference was in how each source interpreted the CCP directive.
Later that day, the U.S. Commerce Department finalized their approval for H-200 exports,
but also with a few conditions.
The chips will be inspected by a third-party testing lab to confirm their AI capabilities
before they can be shipped to China.
Invidia is also limited to shipping 50% as many chips to China as they sell to U.S. customers.
On the Chinese side of the deal, customers will need to demonstrate, quote-unquote,
sufficient security procedures and cannot use the chips for military purposes.
In a statement, Nvidia said that the approval, quote,
strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America. And yet, while all that paperwork is
finalized, it's unclear if Nvidia can't actually start shipping anytime soon due to the Beijing
bans. Some China analysts do believe this is a power play in the lead-up to trade negotiations
in April. Geopolitical strategist, Ravajun writes, Beijing is pushing to see what bigger concessions
they can get to dismantle U.S.-led tech controls. Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations commented, Beijing believes the U.S. is desperate to sell AI chips to China,
so it believes China has the leverage to extract concessions from the U.S. in exchange for license
approvals.
Now, it's an open question whether the Trump administration is desperate to sell AI chips,
but the potential for an Nvidia-led stock market drawdown during an election year could be a
motivating factor.
Staying on the chip train, chip-making startup cerebrus is in talks to raise a billion dollars
at a $22 billion valuation.
Bloomberg sources confirmed that fundraising efforts were underway but added no major details.
The company was aiming to IPO last year but scuttled plans in October shortly after
completing a fundraising round at an $8 billion valuation.
Sources said the company still plans to IPO, with rumors suggesting the aim is to go public
in the second half of this year.
In M&A land, OpenAI has acquired a tiny health tech startup called Torch.
The company operates a platform to unify medical records, including lab results,
prescriptions, and appointment notes, while storing them in a format that's easily
discoverable for AI.
Co-founder Ilya Abbasov wrote,
We designed Torch to be a unified medical memory for AI, bringing every bit of data about you
from hospitals, labs, wearables, and consumer testing companies into one place.
I can't imagine a better next chapter than to now get to put our technology and ideas
in the hands of the hundreds of millions of people who already use chat GPT for health questions
every week.
Now, OpenAI didn't announce the value of the acquisition, but sources speaking with the information
said the price tag was $100 million paid in OpenAI equity.
Not bad for a four-person team.
Lots cooking is always in the world of AI, but for now, that is going to do it for the headlines.
Next up, the main episode.
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are talking about the latest leaks slash rumors about
the next chat GPT model, but I think it's important to put all of this in its proper context.
Let's do a quick hit of the last five months of OpenAI model releases. Things started pretty
inauspiciously in August with the release of GPT.
Now, we've gone over lots of times all of the problems with the GPT-5 release.
One very big problem was the deprecation of 4-0 alongside it, which had people angry at them
for reasons that had nothing to do with the model's performance and everything to do with
other changes that were being made at the same time.
We've also discussed how if they had simply called their biggest reasoning models like
03, GBT5, the perception of the performance jump might have been very different.
Basically, in some ways, they were kind of a victim of their own making.
Whatever the case, the context it came into was not a great moment for the narrative
around AI, and GPD 5 did nothing to alleviate that. That's when we were getting these in retrospect,
very silly op-eds in publications like The New Yorker. What if AI doesn't get much better than this?
Fast forward a couple months, and the pressure was on for Google to deliver. There was a while there
where I wasn't even sure that Google was actually going to drop Gemini 3 in November because of the
amount of pressure they were under to get it right. But get it right they did, at least in the court of
public opinion. When Gemini 3 came out, people were extremely excited about it. They were impressed
with Gemini 3 Pro as a model for their intellectual and work tasks, and of course,
Nanobanamo's ability to make infographics opened up all sorts of totally new possible use
cases. It turns out that OpenAI knew they were in for a rough patch. Back in October, it turns out,
Sam Altman had warned some staff in a memo that he expected some rough vibes around the launch of Google's
new models. Rough vibes they got ultimately leading to Altman and the team at OpenAI declaring a code
red. Now, what this code red meant, in short, was a cessation, or at least a slowdown of work on a lot
of ancillary features and products to double triple-quadruple down on core chat GPT features,
including the models underneath powering it. That got us to GBT 5.2, as well as the new
chat GPT images model, which is it should be noted a 1.5 model, not a full jump to image gen 2.
Now, 5-2 and the new chat-GPT images are good models. 5-2 Pro in particular is very much in my
regular rotation, and when it comes to a lot of heavy intellectual work, there are many folks who
swear by it. Images, frankly, was better than I expected, given how much pressure they had to put
that out given Nanobanana Pro. And so even though Gemini and Google had really won a ton of momentum,
I do think that the chat GPT releases in December maybe didn't fully stem the bleeding, but for people
who weren't interested in the horse race and just wanted high-performing models, you felt very
lucky with all the options you had over the holiday season. But then, of course, around all of this
was Claude Opus 4.5. The opinion on this model has done nothing but go up and up and up and up.
So much so that in a last minute upset, I actually said that I thought it might end up being the
most important model release of 2025, and so far, at least I think that argument is holding up.
Claude, Opus 4.5, and AGI are terms that are very frequent co-inhabitants right now of tweets and posts
on social networks. Since the beginning of the year, these companies have not slowed down.
In a major move to bring Claude Code to everybody else, Anthropic released co-work,
tripling down in that way on their source of narrative momentum, while Google and Apple announced
the deal that was reported at the end of last year that forthcoming versions of Apple Intelligence
will be powered, in fact, by Gemini models.
All of this has led to a sense of a lot of momentum around Anthropic and Google,
and kind of less so around Open AI.
In fact, last night, I tweeted that OpenAI seemed to me to be almost conspicuously quiet,
which perhaps isn't totally fair, given that they announced a major product in Chat, GPT Health,
but still, it feels to me both like something is percolating,
and also that perhaps the company decided to try to do a little bit less vague posting
in this new 2026 year.
Yesterday, the rumor mill kicked back up in a big way.
Dan Mack tweeted, GBT 53, codenamed garlic, coming soon according to a source, a very reliable
source, batting a thousand, expected to be a doozy, likely with stronger pre-training
and the IMO gold-winning reasoning techniques.
The AI leaker account I rule the world responded saying that they had also heard this month,
and in a separate post shared something that they had told subscribers back in December that
the 5-2 model that we got was a, quote, rushed early checkpoint and that the full model is
going to drop in January. Other speculation is that the model will be multimodal, generating both images
and audio, although no one seems quite clear on the naming conventions, whether it will be GPT-5-5,
or even something like GPT-5-3. And of course, while these are all just rumors, although rumors with
sourcing, there is also starting to be some evidence that some newness might be percolating
and poking through. Andrew Curran tweeted, my chat is acting quite differently as of last night.
I assumed it was part of a new personality test group. This has happened many times over the last
couple of months. OpenAI did say the next big update would make five more personable. It's possible
it's about to arrive. Now, maybe I am wrong about the vague tweeting, given that VB from OpenAI's
developer experience team posted the eyes emoji getting everyone talking as part of this conversation
as well. Obviously, any time we get a new model, it's a very exciting moment. And certainly with the
stakes as high as they are, I would love to see a big powerful effort drop that shakes the race up
once again. Now, believe it or not, that wasn't the only information in the AI rumor mill. A Chinese consumer
or electronics blogger has a new leak from their contacts and the supply chain. They wrote,
Hearing Fresh Detail on OpenAI 2Go Hardware Project from last report. Now confirmed, it's a special
audio product to replace AirPods. Internal codename is SweetPee. A manufacturing Foxcon has been told to
prepare for a total of five devices by Q4 2028. All are not known, but a home style device
and pen are still considered. However, many sources repeated the same thing. Sweet Pee is now front
of the line due to the priority of the Johnny Ive team. The release has been told to be near September,
volume projection 40 to 50 million in the first year. Only some details currently known. Hardware design
is said to be unique, unseen before, and the main device is to be metal and resembling the shape
of an eggstone. Inside the eggstone, there are two pills who are removed and rest behind the ear.
A custom chip is being developed to allow the device to replace iPhone actions by commanding Siri,
and overall, Foxcon leaders are still embarrassed by losing all AirPods programs to Lux. Now they see
this as a golden chance to win back the category. We had a show last year about how sneakily AirPods
could be the most obvious AI device form factor that not enough people were thinking about in that way.
And so it's interesting to see the OpenAI hardware team, seemingly exploring some similar space,
although of course something behind the ear is something totally different once again.
Now, moving away from OpenAI, but staying in the new model pool,
another report of a likely model to drop very soon is the next flagship Deepseek model.
The information reports that Deepseek V4 will be released in mid-February
and will have a heavy focus on coding performance.
Writes the information,
the new model V4 is a successor to the V3 model DeepSeek released in December 2024.
Initial tests done by DeepSeek employees based on the company's internal benchmarks
showed that it outperformed existing models such as Anthropics Clod and OpenAI's GPT series
encoding the sources said.
The report also states that V4 will showcase Deepseek's advances in handling extremely long
context windows, which of course is critical for large coding tasks.
Now obviously it would be quite the shakeup to have a state-of-the-art open source coding model,
but of course we don't actually know how it will perform until we see.
It.
Some are convinced, though, that a model code named Baluga on L.M.
is our first look at the Wales next release.
DeepSeek fan tier taxes is skeptical of the sourcing but still believes the hype posting.
I dunk on Breathless Insider leaks about V4, but nobody is more confident than me in what
DeepSeek is about to achieve.
Personally, in my opinion, it'll be the end of the road for Dario-style fantasies.
Developer Vasio posted, feels like we're about to get another overnight jump that was clearly
years in the making.
Deepseek was also in the Western press recently, for a different reason, with the founder
of Deep Seek's quantitative hedge fund generating returns of 57% last year.
writes Bloomberg's Joe Wisenthal, man, this dude's had a good couple of years.
Now, if those are the forthcoming model rumors, we also got a small but real update in V-O-3-1
ingredients to video. The feature allows users to upload reference images for characters,
props, and background to guide the video generation. Google said the upgrade makes videos
more expressive and creative even with simple prompts. They also promised better visual
consistency across multiple scenes to ensure clips can be easily stitched together to tell a
coherent story. Vio can also now use ingredients to video when generating vertical videos for mobile,
which wasn't previously possible. And in a last bit of lab news, which isn't a model right now,
but could be an interesting product in the future, Anthropic has announced the expansion of
their labs team into a full-blown internal incubator. Anthropic Labs was started in mid-20204
with just two members and helped develop Claude Code, MCP, and more recently, co-work. Labs will now
become a more substantial part of the company, with Anthropic aiming to double the lab's head count
within the next six months. The expanded team will be co-led by chief product officer Mike Krieger
and product engineering lead Ben Mann. The team will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amade.
Now, if you want to hear more about how Mike thinks about building AI products, I did an interview
with him as part of our end-of-year episodes which you can find on YouTube or on this podcast feed.
Ultimately, it sounds like a big part of the move is about restructuring the team so that
Anthropics product velocity can match the rapid pace of the industry.
Wrote Daniela, the speed of advancement in AI demands a different approach in how we build,
how we organize and where we focus.
Labs gives us room to break the mold and explore.
Look, if it leads to more products like CodCode,
I think most folks in the industry will say,
Count Us In.
For now, that's the latest on what's cooking around the AI rumor mill.
Hopefully we get some real models in the next couple of weeks to explore.
For now, though, appreciate you listening or watching, as always.
And until next time, peace.
