The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
What I Learned Testing GPT-5.5
24 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What are the first reactions to GPT-5.5?
GPT 5.5, aka SPUD, is here, but does it live up to expectations? This is one of the most hyped models we've had in a very long time, and we are going to go through all of the first reactions, the benchmarks, and of course, about a dozen of my own tests. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Certainly the last few months have seen the company regain its verve, particularly around Codex, which has grown from just a couple hundred thousand users at the beginning of the year to over 4 million now. We've heard about the elimination of side quests, TBPN acquisition notwithstanding, and overall that focus has seemed to reshape the company.
and ultimately leaked memos and grand statements about focus don't matter a fig if it doesn't produce results. Now, honestly, for OpenAI, the stakes heading into the 5.5 release had been increased dramatically because of their competition with Anthropic. Maybe the biggest story for the last few weeks in AI has been the model that we don't have in Anthropic's mythos.
Anthropic basically said to the world, we've got a new powerful model that is a step change in capabilities, but it's too powerful right now for us to provide to the average user. Now, of course, in some cases there has been skepticism that the power is the real reason that Anthropic isn't delivering this.
Some have speculated that it has more to do with compute constraints than true cybersecurity concerns. But it has seemed like the limited set of partner companies that have had access have validated that it is indeed a very good model. Whatever OpenAI put out next then was always going to be their response to that missing mythos model, and the expectations were ratcheted up accordingly.
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Chapter 2: How does GPT-5.5 compare to Anthropic's Mythos model?
GPT-5.5 is OpenAI's clearest bid to reclaim the code and work narrative. It does not win everything. Opus 4.7 seems to write better plans and have a superior eye for design and product details, but GPT-5.5 is faster, steadier, and easier to trust for everyday professional work.
Ben Davis, who works with Theo on his YouTube channel, writes, The best code I've ever seen in AIWrite came from this model. Feels way better to talk to than 5.4 did. Still kind of has that GPT cringe but dialed back. Overall, this is 100% my new everything model. Pietro Sciorano goes farther. GPT-5.5 is the highest leverage tool I've ever touched, he writes.
For the first time, I don't feel limited by what a model can do. I feel limited only by what I can imagine. The most interesting nuanced views came from people who tried to explain the weird idea that while it is a big leap forward for a big portion of users, it's not really going to feel like it. Matt Schumer writes, I've been using GPT-5.5 for the last few weeks. It's a massive leap forward.
But the weird thing is for 99% of users, it probably won't matter. In his review essay, Matt writes, Basically, he says that although it is better in all of these different ways, that does not, in his words, always translate into a dramatic change in his daily workflow. Quote, if I ask it to build something normal, it crushes it. But GPT-5-3 codecs already crushed it. GPT-5-4 already crushed it.
Opus often crushed it. The ceiling is getting so high that a lot of normal work does not stress the models anymore. Now where he argues the real value is then is about the rounding out of capabilities that weren't so great in OpenAI's models before, arguing that design is his clearest example.
Allie K. Miller put it in terms of knowledge professionals, writing, There is a certain class of models, one that we're hitting now, where unless you're deep in code or scientific research, you might not even notice a difference. Now, let's talk about some specific use cases.
And let's start with coding, given that A, it's so important for so many different types of use cases, and B, there was that discussion around that weirdly low SweetBench Pro result. TLDR, people are finding this is a very good coding model. You heard some of that in the initial reactions, but some of the independent testers are finding that as well.
Entrepreneur Bindu Reddy writes, GPT-55 tops LiveBench. It's an extremely good model on both benchmarks and in practice. It tops benchmarks in most categories and is an insanely good instruction follower. In practice, this makes GPT-55 better than Opus 4.7. CodeRabbit writes, we've been testing GPT-5.5 in early access and are excited by its performance in code review.
In our evaluation, it delivered a more direct review flow, stronger signal, and better performance on the issues that matter most. Headline result, 79.2% expected issue found versus 58.3% baseline. Entrepreneur and engineer Flavio Adamo writes, Is GPT-5.5 better than 5.4 at code? Yes.
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Chapter 3: What benchmarks did GPT-5.5 achieve?
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Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. Now I want to get into my tests, but the last discussion point that was really prominent on the internet in the wake of the release of 5.5 was around how different the OpenAI communication felt and the clear narrative repositioning that's going on.
It seems very apparent to me that OpenAI is picking up on the signal that one, people are a little bit annoyed by Anthropic's approach to telling us all about a super powerful model, but then not giving people access. And two, even more, people are really annoyed about performance issues with anthropic models, presumably due to resource constraints.
Contrasts to both of those things run throughout OpenAI's communications around this. For example, in one tweet, Sam Altman writes, we believe in iterative deployment. Although 5.5 is already a smart model, we expect rapid improvements. Iterative deployment is a big part of our safety strategy. We believe the world will be best equipped to win at the team sport of AI resilience in this way.
Now, to be clear, that is something that OpenAI and Altman have always talked about, but they're definitely putting an exclamation point on it right now. As witnessed by the next bullet in that same tweet, where Sam writes, We believe in democratization. We want people to be able to use lots of AI. We want our users to have access to the best technology and for everyone to have equal opportunity.
We have been tracking cybersecurity as a preparedness category for a long time and have built mitigations we believe in that enable us to make capable models broadly available. He said directly to Dario Amadei. Not really, but you get the point. There's also a lot of emphasis on OpenAI's compute resources.
In another tweet, Altman said, Really excellent work by the inference team to serve this model so efficiently. To a significant degree, we have become an AI inference company now. And his overall announcement tweet was really simple. GPT-5-5 is here, he wrote. We hope it's useful to you. I personally like it. Anuat Luru writes, This is a very different kind of comms. Discuss.
Benjamin De Cracker writes, OpenAI seems to have dialed back their hype machine and just focused on building and shipping excellent models lately. That's a breath of fresh air and a winning strategy. A little more pointedly, Justine Moore from A16Z writes, Crazy how you can just ship a model without a giant PR campaign to scare the crap out of everyone first.
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