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Welcome to the podcast. Today on the show, OpenAI is limiting the GPT 5.6 rollout because the government has requested that they push it back while they test it out. Because of that, Europe is pushing AI sovereignty because Trump is doing export controls on Fable 5. And now we have OpenAI GPT 5.6 that they say they need to test for. It can go out to the world. And also we have a company called Petronas AI that just raised $50 million to, to stress test AI agents in simulated worlds. So again, we're having this thing where, you know, these, these models are super powerful that are coming out and the government says, hey, let us look over them. And we have these new companies that are raising money to stress test them. OpenAI is going to be shipping GPT 5.6 in three different tiers and they're going to be undercutting Claude on price, which I think is important given parts of their mission. And Micron, a new company, is overtaking Meta and Tesla in market valuation because AI memory demand is just exploding. And when I say new company, this is a new company, but it's a company for many people in the zeitgeist where we're starting to talk about it because of how important it is to the supply chain. Let's get into what's going on with OpenAI. And speaking of OpenAI, if you've ever wanted to use ChatGPT, but you're like, man, I wish it could do audio generation right inside of it. Or you're like, shoot, I'm, you know, really bummed that ChatGPT is getting rid of Soar, their video model and you want to use Google VO3 inside of it. Or perhaps you use Claude and you're like, man, why doesn't Claude do video, image or audio? I would love for you to try out my own startup, AI Box AI. 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And by the way, you can basically use it to replace ChatGPT or Gemini or anything. It has 80 plus different models. It has Grok, it has Mistral, it has tons of cool open source models for audio, image and music. Go check it out. AI box AI MCP. Okay, let's get into what's going on with OpenAI. The biggest news here, of course, everyone's talking about the fact that the government is forcing them to not roll out the latest model, GPT 5.6. They're arguing that this should be temporary. This is coming because Washington right now is, you know, really tightening their oversight on a lot of these different AI models. I think Anthropic had the biggest pullback because it released Fable 5 before, you know, and the government was like, hey look, you can't let anyone with foreign access get that. And Anthropic was like, hey, look, we think this is a big misunderstanding. You guys shouldn't be regulating. That's what's interesting is we also have Anthropic that just last week put out a report or just a few days ago put out a report to, you know, some government agency where they're like, hey, look, Alibaba over in China did a model distillation attack on us with like 20 million messages to our model. They made 25,000 fake accounts and they did 20 million messages and they're going to use those messages to train their model for way cheaper and this is dangerous, yada, yada. And then they're like, they're like, well, I don't know why, you know, the government is trying to not let us roll out Fable 5. Well, obviously the government's worried that when Fable 5 gets out, Alibaba is going to go. And, you know, or. And not just Alibaba. They're probably a, I mean, semi good actor in this. I don't know. But there's probably a lot of other bad actors that could do the same model distillation attack. They could do Fable 5 or anything else. So anthropic has two sides of the messaging. They're like, look, our models are so good, they're going to destroy the world. And then they're like, Whoa. Why are we being regulated anyways? So now we have this environment where the government thinks it can decide what models are good and bad, and maybe they can, maybe they can't. I don't know. A lot of people have different opinions on that. GPT 5.6 costs about $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens. Terra, which is their next one. So they have three. Sorry, they have three tiers. They got solid Terra and Luna. Soul is the $5. Tara is $2.50, and it is then $15, and then Luna is $1. $6. So Luna is the cheapest. Sol is the best. OpenAI says that Soul basically matches anthropic Claude Mythos 5 on coding, and they say that they're using third. A third of the tokens of the output tokens to build things. They have safety guardrails, and they say that's all inside of the core model behavior, rather than adding this as a separate filter. So with Anthropic, they're like, look, we have mythos 5. It's super dangerous, but we're gonna add all these guardrails on top of it. It'll be fine. And OpenAI says, Look, we already built the guardrails inside the model, so you don't need to do that. I mean, is it true? Well, time will tell, right? Is anyone able to hack it? We'll find out. But they're saying that it's just as good as the mythos 5 model, and they say that it is one third fewer output tokens, which would be incredible if it's actually cheaper and more efficient. A recent Trump executive order required all frontier companies to submit models for government review up to 30 days before release. There was no defined safety standards specified there. So, anyways, again, just a lot of drama on that. And because of all that drama, Europe is now pushing for AI sovereignty. Trump put in these export controls, and France just secured 100 billion euros in AI infrastructure pledges. This is anchored by SoftBank's $75 billion data center bet that they're making right now inside of Europe. Europe is, I think, getting. Honestly, people make this, like, a big, huge, dramatic thing where they're like, oh, you know, the United States has betrayed Europe or whatever, and the US Is just going to do what the US Is going to do. I mean, where we got all sorts of crazy stuff going on over here, and we also have all of the technology. At the end of the day, I think that sovereign AI is a fantastic thing. I think every country should focus on having their own data centers, their own power supply, their own AI models and shouldn't be, you know, reliant on anyone else. So I think at the end of the day, this isn't a bad thing. This isn't like some big drama needs to happen just because Anthropic's Claude, you know, Fable model got pulled. Because I think a lot of people are like, you know, the United States, like betrayed Europe by pulling the Fable model from European users. I mean, they just pulled it from everyone in the whole world. And seems like there's kind of a big policy debate that we're having over here. But in any case, I think that sovereign AI models are fantastic. I'm excited that Softbank is backing a bunch of those programs. Macron has this thing called Choose France. It's an initiative that they announced where they're going to be building a bunch of their own data centers. Fantastic. Anthropic's single $65 billion fund raise exceeded the entire sum invested in all European and UK AI startups last year combined. So at the end of the day, like, there's all of these national programs that are going on, but there's still like a drop in the bucket compared to what just one company in the United States was able to raise. And then we have a lot of different companies. So I think at the end of the day, Europe should build out what they're, what they're focusing on. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity for new, new innovation to come out of these countries because they'll, you know, people will finally be funding national, like, AI, like, I guess, smaller AI companies for geo geographic reasons rather than everyone just dumping more money into the mega caps, the OpenAI and the Anthropic. So I'm excited to see more competition in the marketplace. 1 so with all of this drama around these AI models, you know, coming out and how dangerous are they and how good are they? There's a new company called Petronas AI and they just raised $50 million. It's their series B. And the way that what they're doing is they're trying to simul digital worlds. So they're basically testing the new AI agents before they get deployed. You can imagine, right? The government was like, look, you got to give us 30 days before you put it out. And in my mind I'm like, what are you guys doing in 30 days that you could possibly test these things? Apparently Patronus AI could be an answer to that, where they're simulating the Real world. And they're taking these AI models and they're just telling them to wreak havoc and seeing what they could actually do. I mean, not really just wreak havoc, but they're trying to stress test it, right? So they're building a simulated world and letting it run there. Their revenue grew 15x in the last year. There's a bunch of different AI labs that are trying to get these kind of testings done and I think this is, this is a great company that's working on it. Petronas has digital replicas of websites and internal systems where agents can train under reinforcement learning. It's going to reward task completion and it's going to penalize errors. So it's interesting, right? They have like, you know, like when they say they've made a digital world, it's not like they've like a literal, it's not like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse. They're making a world of computers and systems and code and they've probably grabbed a whole bunch of open source projects, if I'm being honest, and spun up a lot of, you know, a lot of stuff where these models have to try to interact, get tasks done. They probably do penetration testing, that kind of stuff. So notable capital, Lightspeed, Datadog, Samsung, all of them joined greenfield partners in this round and the total funding for this company is about $70 million. It was just founded in 2023. I'm excited to see where they go with this. A company called Micron has just overtaken Meta and Tesla in market value because of the crazy demand for AI memory. That's, you know, I mean this isn't just a, this is a problem basically for everyone. We just had Apple yesterday say that they're raising the prices on all MacBooks by $100, MacBook Airs and then $300 on the MacBook Pros. And like basically everything's going up in price because there's this huge memory shortage everywhere which is caused by AI. It's just like really explosive demand for high bandwidth memory or hbm. And this is of course used for AI training clusters. So something that a lot of people are bringing up is that this is basically showing that memory and not just GPUs alone are now kind of gating or kind of like a constraint for the AI infrastructure build out. I think in the past everyone was like, oh man, how are we ever going to get enough GPUs from Nvidia? And Nvidia has like, you know, limits to how many they'll sell to a specific company. And that was kind of, I guess the last couple of years, what everyone's been worried about. No longer is it GPUs. Now we're just literally running out of memory and that's going to kind of hold back the AI infrastructure build out. So I think these suppliers that are really kind of have a bottleneck on the memory infrastructure are going to be making a ton of money and Micron is one of them. And by the way, HBM is basically a custom something that is custom engineered for Nvidia accelerators and it's sold under multi year supply agreements. They sell this at a premium pricing that basically traditional DRAM can never. So only three companies can actually manufacture HBM at scale. That's Micron, SK Hynix, which is I believe in Korea, and then also Samsung and I believe SK Hynix is planning an IPO in the United States soon or they're at least looking at this and then Samsung. And so basically there is some enormous price power for suppliers because there's this kind of two year demand surge that's been coming. There's not a lot of suppliers that are able to make this. Meta and Tesla both, which are huge hyperscalers, now rank below the component supplier Micron, which both of them are using. Right? They're both dependent on Micron, but I think that just goes to show how much projected AI growth is tied to infrastructure. You know, they actually have to go buy this externally and so it's incredible to see the run up that Micron has been doing. Guys, thank you so much for joining the podcast today, for tuning in. If you learned anything new. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a rating review wherever you get your podcasts on Apple, leave a comment. I read them all. Drop some stars if there's any topics or companies you want covered or things you'd like me to talk about more. And make sure to go check out AI box AI mcp. I'll leave a link in the description. If you want to get images, audio and video inside of Claude or any of your other models, you can get access to over 80 different AI models inside whatever AI tool or whatever AI model you're using. All right, thanks so much for tuning in. I'll catch you all in the next episode.
Date: June 26, 2026
Host: How I AI Stuff
In this episode, the host explores OpenAI's highly anticipated launch of GPT-5.6, examining why its rollout is being delayed due to government intervention, the competitive pricing compared to Anthropic's Claude, and the broader implications for global AI infrastructure. The show also covers Europe’s push for AI sovereignty, fundraising milestones within the AI sector, and the critical shortage of memory hardware driven by AI demand, with Micron emerging as a surprising industry winner. Additional highlights include the rise of Petronas AI, a company dedicated to stress testing advanced AI agents.
[02:05–07:30]
Government Delay:
The rollout of GPT-5.6 is temporarily on hold due to a U.S. government request for pre-release testing of advanced AI models.
"OpenAI is limiting the GPT 5.6 rollout because the government has requested that they push it back while they test it out." (00:10)
“A recent Trump executive order required all frontier companies to submit models for government review up to 30 days before release. There was no defined safety standards specified there.” (09:47)
Regulatory Environment:
The host explains a growing trend of AI oversight, citing an incident where Anthropic’s Fable 5 model was pulled from international release under pressure.
"Anthropic had the biggest pullback because it released Fable 5 before, you know, and the government was like, hey look, you can't let anyone with foreign access get that." (03:18)
Dual Messaging from AI Companies:
The host notes the irony in Anthropic’s messaging:
“Anthropic has two sides of the messaging. They're like, look, our models are so good, they're going to destroy the world. And then they're like, Whoa. Why are we being regulated anyways?” (05:46)
Security Concerns:
Distillation attacks are highlighted as a new threat, with Alibaba allegedly siphoning messages from Anthropic’s models for cheaper training.
"Alibaba over in China did a model distillation attack on us with like 20 million messages… this is dangerous, yada, yada." (04:12)
[07:35–09:40]
Three Pricing Tiers:
GPT-5.6 launches in three versions:
“They got Sol, Terra and Luna. Sol is the $5. Terra is $2.50, and it is then $15, and then Luna is $1. $6. So Luna is the cheapest. Sol is the best.” (07:47)
Competitive Posturing:
OpenAI’s Sol tier is positioned as directly equivalent to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 for coding, but is purportedly cheaper and requires one-third fewer output tokens for similar tasks.
“OpenAI says that Sol basically matches Anthropic Claude Mythos 5 on coding, and they say that they're using a third of the tokens…” (08:12)
Built-in Safety:
OpenAI claims to have integrated safety guardrails within GPT-5.6’s core architecture, as opposed to Anthropic’s separate filtering layers.
"OpenAI says, Look, we already built the guardrails inside the model, so you don't need to do that. I mean, is it true? Well, time will tell, right?" (08:51)
[09:45–13:10]
US Export Controls:
Trump's administration implements tighter export controls, seen especially around advanced models like Fable 5.
Europe Moves Toward AI Sovereignty:
With tighter U.S. controls, Europe accelerates its AI sovereignty agenda, backed by major investment:
“France just secured 100 billion euros in AI infrastructure pledges. This is anchored by SoftBank's $75 billion data center bet...” (11:28)
Sovereign AI Encouraged:
The host is optimistic about national efforts:
“At the end of the day, I think that sovereign AI is a fantastic thing. I think every country should focus on having their own data centers, their own power supply, their own AI models…” (11:57)
Comparative Scale:
Still, U.S. companies vastly outpace European funding.
“Anthropic's single $65 billion fund raise exceeded the entire sum invested in all European and UK AI startups last year combined.” (12:41)
[13:11–15:05]
Funding and Mission:
Petronas AI raises $50M Series B, aiming to simulate digital environments for testing advanced AI agent behavior before public deployment.
“They're basically testing the new AI agents before they get deployed… they’re building a simulated world and letting it run there.” (13:19)
How It Works:
Petronas creates digital replicas of websites and internal systems, leveraging reinforcement learning to stress test agents.
“Petronas has digital replicas of websites and internal systems where agents can train under reinforcement learning. It's going to reward task completion and penalize errors.” (14:05)
Growth and Backing:
Revenue up 15x in a year; key backers include Lightspeed, Datadog, Samsung, and Greenfield Partners.
“The total funding for this company is about $70 million. It was just founded in 2023.” (14:51)
[15:06–17:50]
Market Shakeup:
Micron, a “new” company for many, surpasses Meta and Tesla in value due to high-bandwidth memory (HBM) demand in AI.
"Meta and Tesla both, which are huge hyperscalers, now rank below the component supplier Micron, which both of them are using." (16:48)
AI Hardware Shortages:
The explosive demand for HBM causes supply challenges and drives up prices, even impacting consumer products like MacBooks.
“Basically everything's going up in price because there's this huge memory shortage everywhere which is caused by AI.” (16:14)
Industry Concentration:
Only three companies—Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung—can manufacture this specialized memory at scale, giving them large pricing power for the next few years.
"There's not a lot of suppliers that are able to make this. …there is some enormous price power for suppliers because there's this kind of two year demand surge..." (17:09)
On OpenAI vs. Anthropic:
"OpenAI says, Look, we already built the guardrails inside the model, so you don't need to do that. I mean, is it true? Well, time will tell, right? Is anyone able to hack it? We'll find out." (08:51)
On the AI Infrastructure Boom:
"Memory and not just GPUs alone are now kind of gating or kind of like a constraint for the AI infrastructure build out." (16:41)
On Sovereign AI:
"I think every country should focus on having their own data centers, their own power supply, their own AI models and shouldn't be, you know, reliant on anyone else." (11:57)
This episode blends the latest AI industry news with sharp analysis, focusing on regulatory clampdowns, the maturing competitive landscape for AI models, the growing emphasis on sovereign infrastructure, and the real-world constraints posed by hardware shortages. Listeners get a sense of both the business excitement and the underlying complexity shaping the next AI era, along with some pointed, candid opinions from the host.