“AI #176 Part 1: Doing It Live” by Zvi

Enough things added up that this week is getting split into two parts.

Then on Monday, if all goes as I expect, we’ll cover OpenAI's Sol, aka GPT-5.6.

OpenAI also gave us an upgraded voice mode, which I haven’t tried out but early reports are that it is a step change.

AI writing, especially Claude writing, is becoming more prominent and harder not to notice, and increasingly a tough read when encountered in the wild. Does anyone care? Or are those who care the weird ones here?

This week saw an excellent paper, which I cover in No Space Like J-Space.

Technically we also got Grok 4.5.

Table of Contents

1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. A whole new world.
2. Language Models Gain Unexpected Affordances. Wait, you can just do that?
3. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Things get old.
4. Pay The Man His Money. You have a few more days with marginally free Fable.
5. Huh, Upgrades. Anthropic raises API platform limits.
6. Grok 4.5 Exists. It might be okay for its price.
7. F*** It We’re Doing It Live. OpenAI gives us a big upgrade to voice [...]

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Outline:

(00:54) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:21) Language Models Gain Unexpected Affordances

(06:12) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(06:54) Pay The Man His Money

(07:37) Huh, Upgrades

(07:45) Grok 4.5 Exists

(09:12) F\*\*\* It We're Doing It Live

(10:24) On Your Marks

(11:13) Better Call Sol

(22:40) Get My Agent On The Line

(23:29) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(25:33) Fool Me Twice

(27:23) I Like Your Style

(33:28) Enough With That Style

(36:58) Fun With Media Generation

(38:51) Copyright Confrontation

(39:30) Cyber Lack of Security

(39:52) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(45:56) They Took Our Jobs

(51:07) Get Involved

(52:10) In Other AI News

(56:44) Show Me the Money

(57:09) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

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First published:
July 9th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M9eLyMsH5DLjMYL86/ai-176-part-1-doing-it-live

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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