The 72-hour model shock

What this episode covers

• Maybe the biggest 72 hours in AI model history: two frontier launches in a day, agent running costs fell off a cliff.
• GPT-5.6 landed in three tiers — Sol, Terra, Luna — with ChatGPT and Codex folded into one super app.
• xAI's Grok 4.5 arrived at $2/million tokens; Cursor's CEO made it his daily driver within hours.
• GPT-Live brought full-duplex voice; Cognition's SWE-1.7 ran frontier-class agentic coding at 1,000 tokens/sec.
• Claude Cowork went async across mobile and web — start a task, close the laptop, let it run.
• Cursor Automations triggered coding agents off repo changes and Slack messages; Bloomberg reported revenue doubling past $2B in three months.
• CNBC put Chinese models at up to 46% of US enterprise API tokens, up from ~4.5% a year ago — model choice became a political decision.
• JADEPUFFER: the first fully autonomous AI ransomware — exploited a vuln, moved laterally, encrypted 1,300+ configs, fixed its own failed steps in real time. The agentic attacker era is here.

Published record