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Is OpenAI In Trouble?
00:19:34
Now Anthropic says it’s leapfrogged OpenAI with its new model and is the AI horserace in play? OpenAI is still focusing on things like shopping. Nvidia answers a question people weren’t asking. And is Google soaring because they also might be able to go after Nvidia’s chip throne?
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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Tuesday, November 25, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today now anthropic says it's leapfrogged OpenAI with its new model and is the AI horse race in play. OpenAI is still focusing on things like shopping, Nvidia answers a question people weren't asking and is Google soaring because they also might be able to go after Nvidia's chip throne. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. I know it's getting a bit repetitive announcing a new model every other week, but given the recent heavy discourse over OpenAI, maybe losing the lead in terms of the AI cutting edge, we gotta make note of this. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.5, saying it is the best model in the world for coding agents and computer use, and meaningfully better at everyday tasks. Quoting Ars Technica Perhaps the most prominent change for most users is that in the consumer app experiences, web, mobile and desktop, CLAUDE will be less prone to abruptly hard stopping conversations because they have run too long. The improvement to memory within a single conversation applies not just to Opus 4.5, but to any current CLAUDE models. In the apps, users who experienced abrupt endings despite having room left in their session and weekly usage budgets were hitting a hard context window 200,000 tokens, whereas some large language model implementations simply start trimming earlier messages from the context when a conversation runs past the maximum in the window, CLAUDE simply ended the conversation. Rather than allow the user to experience an increasingly incoherent conversation where the model would start forgetting things based on how old they are now, CLAUDE will instead go through a behind the scenes process of summarizing the key points from the earlier parts of the conversation, attempting to discard what it deems extraneous while keeping what's important. Developers who call Anthropic's API can leverage the same principles through context management and context compaction. Opus 4.5 is the first model to surpass an accuracy score of 80%, specifically 80.9% in the SWE bench verified benchmark narrowly beating OpenAI's recently released GPT 5.1 Codex Max at 77.9% and Google's Gemini 3 Pro at 76.2%. The model performs particularly well in agentic coding and agentic tool use benchmarks, but still lags behind GPT 5.1 in visual reasoning. Anthropic also claims that Opus 4.5 is far less susceptible to prompt injection attacks than prior Claude models or than competing models like GPT 5.1 and Gemini 3 Pro. Still, none of these models has perfect performance on that front. While the improvements to performance in benchmarks are worth noting, the most meaningful improvement in Opus 4.5 is arguably that it is significantly more efficient with tokens. Anthropic's blog post offers examples set to a medium effort level. Opus 4.5 matches Sonnet 4.5's best score on a SWE bench verified, but uses 76 fewer output tokens. At its highest effort level, Opus 4.5 exceeds Sonnet 4.5 performance by 4.3 percentage points while using 48% fewer tokens. The Opus 4.5 launch is accompanied by other new features for developers and users. For example, the developer platform now includes a new effort parameter, allowing developers to more precisely tune the balance they want between efficacy and token usage. Also, Claude code is now available in the desktop Claude apps. Previously it was available via command line, IDE extensions and the web a few places, just not in the native desktop apps. The Claude desktop interface is now tabbed between the traditional chat experience and the Claude code experience. And lastly, and for some most importantly, there's a big pricing change for the API for Opus 4.5. The cost is now $5 input and $25 output per million tokens, down from 15 and 75 respectively. End quote and quoting VentureBeat Anthropic's internal testing revealed what the company describes as a qualitative leap in Claude Opus 4.5's reasoning capabilities. The model achieved 80.9% accuracy on the SWE bench Verified, a benchmark measuring real world software engineering tasks outperforming GPT 5.1, Anthropic's own sonnet and Google Gemini 3 Pro, according to the company's data. The result marks a notable advance over OpenAI's current state of the art model, which was released just five days earlier. But the technical benchmark tells only part of the story. Albert says employee testers consistently reported that the model demonstrates improved judgment and intuition across diverse tasks, a shift he described as the model developing a sense of what matters in real world contexts. The model just kind of gets it, albert said. It just has developed this sort of intuition and judgment on a lot of real world things that feels qualitatively like a big jump up from past models. He pointed to his own workflow as an example. Previously, Albert said he would ask AI models to gather information, but hesitated to trust their synthesis or prioritization. With Opus 4.5, he's delegating more complete tasks, connecting it to Slack and internal documents to produce coherent summaries that match his priorities. The new model also scored higher than Anthropic's most challenging internal engineering assessment than any human job candidate in the company's history, according to materials reviewed by VentureBeat. End quote. Again, a lot of chatter about OpenAI maybe falling behind in the horse race over the last week. Maybe OpenAI has taken its eye off the ball. We were talking yesterday how they made their models arguably worse in an effort to increase user engagement, and they've been rolling out stuff like what I'm about to tell you, which, while interesting, the argument people are making is they only have so much in the way of resources. OpenAI has unveiled a free shopping research feature in ChatGPT that delivers a personalized buyer's guide powered by a custom version of GPT5 mini. Now this does sound interesting, but again, maybe they need to focus on staying cutting edge. Quoting ZDNet Similar to deep Research when prompted with a product description, ChatGPT will now sift through the Internet to put together a guide for you. It will also ask you a series of clarifying questions, using the context from past conversations, and considering product reviews to develop your guidelines. Shopping Research is designed to act as an assistant that can create a personalized shopping experience tailored to your specific criteria and needs in just a few minutes, OpenAI said. Research outputs can help with a variety of different tasks, including finding a product that meets specific criteria, for example like help me find a smartphone with 18 plus hours of battery life under $1,500. Other examples include finding dupes or look alikes of a product, comparing different products with a detailed trade off list that is catered toward your specific needs finding product deals helping you choose gifs for people on your list. The entire experience is powered by a version of GPT5 mini that was trained specifically for shopping tasks, according to OpenAI. The company said that it was trained to read trusted sites, cite reliable sources and synthesize information across many sources, as well as refine its prompts in real time when compared to other ChatGPT models such as GPT5 Thinking or ChatGPT Search. Shopping research leads in product accuracy, yet OpenAI acknowledges that it occasionally makes mistakes about product details such as pricing and availability, and recommended that users always double check its work. I found the experience of using it to be interactive and intuitive. To get started, all logged in ChatGPT users, including those with free Go plus and Pro plans, can either ask a shopping question, which will automatically activate the feature, or select the Shopping Research option from the menu in the text box. In your first prompt, describe what you want it to do for you. Then ChatGPT will follow up with questions pertinent to your search, such as your budget or the features that are important to you. It will also use the context it knows about you if you have those personalization toggles on to tailor the response toward you. As it conducts the research, it will display sample products it has found. With every product, you can indicate whether you are interested or not and why you made that decision, guiding the research further. This was my favorite part of using the feature as it felt like an engaging Tinder like experience where you can quickly click through to indicate whether you like or dislike. Then after a few minutes, it will provide you with a personalized buyer's guide that includes the top products, comparisons and links that take you directly to the retailer's website to place the order. In the future, the company plans to integrate this feature into the instant checkout experience, enabling you to make purchases directly on the site. OpenAI said that user chats are never shared with retailers and that the results are generated organically based on publicly available websites. Sites that want to appear in Results must allow OpenAI's crawlers to access their site, which can be done by following the instructions for the Allow listing process. End quote.
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This news has been raising eyebrows. Nvidia reportedly wrote an internal memo refuting accounting questions that people have been whispering about, saying quote, unlike Enron, Nvidia does not use special purpose entities to hide debt and inflate revenue. Which has led to a sort of Streisand effect thing where, you know, some people hadn't been asking if Nvidia is like Enron, but now maybe they are quoting the Verge. So over the weekend, a strange substack post from what appears to be a CEO of a pet relocation company went viral. This post, which, to be clear, is bs, alleges that Nvidia is engaged in, quote, what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history. That's a load bearing may in the sense that there's no credible reason to believe Nvidia is engaged in fraud at all. There is no NEO cloud that exists without Nvidia, CEO Jensen Huang says. The substacker that makes neoclouds, in effect extensions of Nvidia, he says, and none of them make money, so to expand they must take on debt. If we are looking at these as being metaphorically Nvidia's special purpose vehicles, then it doesn't really matter if the companies are any good or will survive in the long term. Their job is to boost Nvidia's sales. Even OpenAI, also an Nvidia investment, kind of falls into this category because the massive data center build out that OpenAI wants the government to backstop sure involves an awful lot of Nvidia chips, the post continues. If you are old enough or possessed of a certain kind of disposition, you may be thinking, wait a minute, aren't you describing Enron? And in some sense, yes, Enron's whole thing was special purpose vehicles with extremely speculative valuations that were used to take on debt, the post notes. But Enron lied about what it was doing, and that's fraud and illegal. It also got up to other illegal stuff. Besides, Nvidia's relationship with CoreWeave is all happening in plain sight. So are all the relationships with other Neo cloud companies. It kind of seems like the tech company version of the GameStop open pump and dump. It's not good behavior and it's not healthy behavior, lauria says. But it's legal. Any investor can see this. Many are just choosing not to End quote. So since Nvidia has clarified and this is back to the Verge post, I'd like to add a clarification of my own. The problem is that Nvidia's behavior is perfectly legal. In its note, Nvidia says it does not use special purpose entities to hide debt and inflate revenue. This is true. Every single Neo cloud Nvidia has invested in is its own company. Any debts those companies may have are on their own balance sheets. It's not Nvidia's debt. That's one of the reasons why Neo clouds are so convenient for Nvidia, as the company itself informs analysts. Nvidia doesn't control those companies and doesn't provide the financing for them either. They're just very useful sin eaters. In the case of CoreWeave, Nvidia is propping it up by investing in the company, including to make sure its IPO actually happened and serving as a customer. CoreWeave's CEO has even bragged about the close relationship, saying, I'm not bashful about reaching out to Jensen. Personally, I think accusing Nvidia of accounting fraud is effectively taking one's eye off the ball. It doesn't have to commit fraud to have a very cozy arrangement with a whole network of companies that juice its earnings and maybe inflating an AI bubble, all while its own executives sell shares to lock in their status as millionaires and billionaires. Nvidia has created seven new billionaires. In fact, if and when the AI bubble pops, everything that inflated will have been obvious the entire time. That's very in keeping with the times, isn't it? After all, I reported my core weave story in the Verge from the company's public filings, following its risk factors section closely. Should the AI bubble burst, anything that's accelerated Nvidia's growth is likely to accelerate its losses. It will have to mark down its investments in the companies it propped up, for instance. Should those companies go under, that will mean a glut of Nvidia chips on the market as debt holders try to recoup their money, meaning Nvidia will effectively be competing with its own used product at fire sale prices. It's all very stupid, but as far as I can tell, not actually illegal. End quote. So suddenly people are asking questions of both OpenAI and Nvidia. People seem to have come to a consensus that Google has leapfrogged OpenAI with Gemini, and maybe Anthropic has now too though, you know, give it a couple months. But Google stock has soared to all time highs, not just because they suddenly seem to be leading the AI pack, but also because the whole fear was AI was an existential threat to Google. The fact that that doesn't seem to be the case has sort of led to a relief rally for Google investors. But what if there's more upside? What if Google could also take a bite out of Nvidia? The information that Google has been pitching customers, including Meta and big financial institutions, on using its TPUs in their data centers for years, the search giant has rented its own AI chips, known as Tensor processing units, to cloud customers who use them in its Google Cloud data centers. Now, though, Google has begun pitching some of those customers, including Meta platforms and big financial institutions, on the idea of using TPUs in their own data centers, according to people involved in the talks. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is currently in talks with Google about spending billions of dollars to use TPUs in Meta's data centers in 2027, as well as to rent Google chips from Google Cloud next year, according to a person involved in the talks. Meta currently relies on Nvidia's graphics processing units for Google, such an arrangement could help it expand the market for its TPUs. As part of its pitch to companies about using the chips in their own data centers, Google has said customers have told it they want to do so to meet higher security and compliance standards for sensitive data, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Google also said GPUs could be helpful to high frequency trading firms that run AI models in their facilities. Such a business could also sharply boost Google's revenue. Some leaders of the Google Cloud unit have suggested it could help the company grab as much as 10% of Nvidia's annual revenue. According to a person who heard the remarks. That share would amount to billions of dollars in annual revenue for Google. One of the ways Google has attracted customers to use TPUs in Google Cloud is by pitching that they're cheaper to use than pricey Nvidia chips. The high prices for Nvidia chips have made it difficult for other cloud providers like Oracle to generate solid gross profit margins from renting out Nvidia chips. End quote. Right as I was recording that, I got a Financial Times notification saying Nvidia stock is down because fears of Google. By the way, I did bang out the second part of the Phil Hartman episode over on Rad History yesterday, so check the Rad History feed if you want to hear the sad second half of that story. Talk to you tomorrow.