Neural Newscast

[00:00] Nina Park: I am Nina Park, and this is Model Behavior.
[00:04] Nina Park: We begin today with a series of major moves in the enterprise AI space,
[00:09] Nina Park: led by Antropics' first major release of 2026
[00:13] Nina Park: and a massive wave of capital investment from the industry's largest players.
[00:18] Thatcher Collins: I'm Thatcher Collins.
[00:21] Thatcher Collins: Joining us today is Chad Thompson,
[00:23] Thatcher Collins: who provides a systems-level perspective on AI, automation, and security.
[00:29] Thatcher Collins: blending technical depth, and creative insight from engineering.
[00:33] Chad Thompson: Chad, it is good to have you back.
[00:35] Chad Thompson: Glad to be here, Thatcher.
[00:37] Chad Thompson: Nina, the numbers we are seeing this week,
[00:42] Chad Thompson: both in model performance and infrastructure spending,
[00:46] Chad Thompson: Suggest we are entering a very high-stakes phase of the AI deployment cycle.
[00:50] Nina Park: That is certainly reflected in Anthropics' latest.
[00:54] Nina Park: On February 5th, they launched Claude Opus 4.6.
[00:58] Nina Park: The standout feature is Agent Teams, which allows the model to split projects across multiple agents that coordinate within Claude Code.
[01:08] Nina Park: This comes as Anthropic is reportedly finalizing a $20 billion funding round at a $350 billion
[01:16] Nina Park: valuation.
[01:17] Thatcher Collins: Exactly, Nina.
[01:18] Thatcher Collins: The technical capabilities are showing real-world utility beyond just code generation.
[01:24] Thatcher Collins: Anthropic revealed that Opus 4.6 discovered over 500 previously unknown high-severity security
[01:31] Thatcher Collins: vulnerabilities in open-source libraries like GhostScript and OpenSC.
[01:35] Thatcher Collins: It did this out of the box without specialized prompting,
[01:39] Thatcher Collins: highlighting a significant leap in reasoning for security auditing.
[01:43] Chad Thompson: What is interesting from a systems perspective is how OpenAI is responding.
[01:48] Chad Thompson: They just launched Frontier, an enterprise platform specifically designed to manage
[01:53] Chad Thompson: fleets of these agents across business applications.
[01:56] Chad Thompson: They also introduced GPT-5.3 Codex, which they claim actually helped write and debug its own training code.
[02:04] Chad Thompson: We are seeing models being used to build the next generation of models, which accelerates the development loop significantly.
[02:11] Nina Park: The scale of this competition is reflected in the capital expenditures.
[02:16] Nina Park: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are projecting a combined CapEx of $650 to $700 billion for 2026.
[02:26] Nina Park: To put that in perspective, that is nearly double their 2025 spending and exceeds the combined CapEx of 21 other major U.S. industries.
[02:35] Nina Park: Amazon alone is looking at $200 billion.
[02:39] Thatcher Collins: Nina, it is a massive bet on infrastructure, particularly data centers and power.
[02:46] Thatcher Collins: Microsoft is projecting a 600% increase in electricity demand by 2030.
[02:52] Thatcher Collins: You know, the adoption side shows some friction.
[02:55] Thatcher Collins: While Google's Gemini reached 750 million monthly active users in Q4 2025,
[03:02] Thatcher Collins: Microsoft is facing challenges with Copilot.
[03:05] Thatcher Collins: Reports indicate only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users are paying for those features,
[03:12] Thatcher Collins: and active use remains lower than anticipated.
[03:15] Chad Thompson: That gap between infrastructure investment and active enterprise utility
[03:20] Chad Thompson: is the critical metric for 2026.
[03:24] Chad Thompson: We're also seeing shifts in leadership, for instance.
[03:27] Chad Thompson: XAI co-founder Tony Wu resigned just as the company integrates with SpaceX.
[03:33] Chad Thompson: On the research side, though, tools like OpenScholar are showing promise,
[03:37] Chad Thompson: citing scientific sources with accuracy that scientists preferred over human experts 51% of the time.
[03:46] Nina Park: It is a complex landscape of massive spending and evolving benchmarks.
[03:54] Nina Park: Chad, thank you for sharing your perspective on these systems today.
[03:58] Nina Park: I am Nina Park, and that's our look at the current state of model behavior.
[04:03] Thatcher Collins: And I'm Thatcher Collins.
[04:05] Thatcher Collins: We will continue to track these infrastructure shifts and model developments as they unfold.
[04:11] Thatcher Collins: For more, visit mb.neuralnewscast.com.
[04:15] Thatcher Collins: Thank you for listening.
[04:17] Thatcher Collins: Neural Newscast is AI-assisted, human-reviewed.
[04:21] Thatcher Collins: View our AI transparency policy at neuralnewscast.com.