GPT-5.5 release illustration

GPT-5.5 Is Here: Real Step Forward or Quiet Iteration?

TL;DR GPT-5.5 (“Spud”) is the first fully retrained base model since GPT-4.5, with architecture and pretraining reworked from scratch with agentic objectives in mind It takes the top spot on Terminal-Bench 2.0 (82.7%) and GDPval (84.9%), narrowly beating Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview on agentic coding benchmarks A 1M-token context window is new for OpenAI, enabling whole-codebase reasoning and long multi-step agent runs without context collapse Pricing is competitive ($5/$30 per million input/output tokens) but the strategic story is about OpenAI building an integrated super app - chat, code, browser agent - all driven by one model The gains are incremental, not a leap - but the full retraining signals OpenAI is betting the next two years on autonomous agentic work, not chat OpenAI released GPT-5.5 on April 23, 2026, weeks after GPT-5.4 and only months after GPT-5. The cadence is starting to feel relentless. Codenamed “Spud” internally, GPT-5.5 is the first fully retrained base model since GPT-4.5 - architecture, pretraining corpus, and agent-oriented objectives all reworked from scratch. ...

April 24, 2026 · 6 min · James M
Claude Opus Icon

Claude Opus 4.7: Autonomy and Vision at Scale

TL;DR Claude Opus 4.7 raises the vision ceiling to 3.75 megapixels (2,576 pixels), letting Claude read dense screenshots and complex charts without losing detail Autonomous software engineering is the headline upgrade - Opus 4.7 can handle complex, long-running tasks with reduced need for constant direction A new xhigh effort level for extended thinking gives developers explicit control over the speed-versus-reasoning tradeoff Improved instruction-following and resistance to prompt injection make it safer for production use Pricing remains unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens - this is the new standard, not a premium tier Opus 4.7 is a meaningful step forward. Not a revolutionary rewrite, but a targeted upgrade that addresses friction points developers actually experience: vision quality, autonomous task handling, and creative output. ...

April 16, 2026 · 5 min · James M