Today on the AI Daily Brief, GPT5.4 is here, and these are both the first impressions from the broader world as well as my first test results.

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.

First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, AIUC, Blitzy, and Prompt QL.

To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can

subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

If you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIdailybrief.ai.

Lastly, as often happens,

when we have a big new model release, no headlines today, we are just going to spend all of our

time on this exciting new model. So without any further ado, let's dive in.

After a couple of weeks where mostly we've been talking about big macro issues like the Pentagon and Anthropic

and all of that sort of thing, we finally have the cool, fresh breeze of a new exciting model

to test. And this one indeed is pretty exciting. Ethan Mollick tweeted, I think we've been through

enough release cycles for models at this point to say that the latest model from OpenAI or Anthropic

or Google is generally going to be the best model in the world upon release, with some jagged edges until

the next release by one of the big three. Now with that background, a different way to look at

where we've been is that it's simply been OpenAI's turn. However, the expectations coming

into GPT 5.4 were a little bit higher than they might have been for some of OpenAI's more recent releases. Ever since the release of GPT5, all the big model providers got the memo that trying to promise too much in each update, rather than just being very incremental, was a pretty scary proposition. That's what got us the 5-1, 5-2, 5-3, now 5-4 kind of paradigm. But of course, it's not just OpenAI doing that. Google and Anthropic are both on that same plan as well. And yet, even with that, 5.4 has had a little bit more hype and anticipation around it than some of the previous iterative models that we've gotten more recently. This was theoretically supposed to be the big outcome of OpenAI's

Code Red, which was launched back in December. And what's more, the buzz for the last week or

week and a half or so, has been that this one was really meaningful. Enough so that it almost felt

to me, like some of the more recent leaks two publications like the information, were almost

trying to tamp down on expectations. To take one example,

...