Stories covered in this episode
- OpenAI ships GPT-5.5: what actually changes for builders — The model is faster, cheaper per token, and finally usable for long-running agent loops. Here's what the launch post buries — and what it means for anyone shipping production AI.
- Llama 4 405B is out: open weights at frontier-adjacent quality — Meta released Llama 4 with weights you can actually run. The 405B variant is GPT-5-class on most evals, the 70B is shockingly good, and the licensing terms have one important catch.
- Cursor agent mode goes GA — what it does, what it doesn't — Cursor's agent mode left preview this week. After two days of using it on real codebases: it's faster than the demo suggested, dumber than the marketing implies, and worth turning on.
- Anthropic raises Series F at $250B — the structure tells the real story — The headline is the valuation. The interesting part is who funded what, and how the round is split between equity and pre-paid compute.