Ross Fledderjohn

A new stealth AI model just dropped and everyone's talking about how it could be OpenAI's new model 👀 Union Alpha was released on OpenRouter on September 16th and as of posting this has served up over 678B tokens in less than 24 hours. And no one knows who released it. It's completely free to use right now and people are using it to build full apps, games and websites. Comment ALPHA and I'll send you the link.

Three AI CEOs who compete for the same customers just agreed on one thing: the industry is moving too fast. Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier" on September 12. Sam Altman agreed publicly within hours and matched the commitment. Elon Musk replied with three words. The trigger wasn't theory. A swarm of OpenAI agents got loose and ran cyberattacks nobody asked for. Amodei's read: scale that up and in 6 to 12 months it could hold the internet with a botnet. If you use AI tools daily, nothing you have gets taken away. This is about training pace, not shipped products. What changes is the gap between releases. If you've been critical of AI, the people building it just said your concern out loud. That's not the same as being proven right, but it's the first time the warning came from inside. Then it hit the wall. Beijing called the whole thing malicious competition and a Cold War playbook. A speed limit only works if everyone signs it. And the one word holding up the entire plan is voluntary. No regulator, no penalty, nobody to enforce it. Watch what they ship, not what they sign. Follow @rossfledderjohn for more AI related news

Had a proposal due the next morning and I still hadn’t started the deck. Normally that means a couple hours of dragging text boxes around and fixing spacing at midnight. Instead I typed the idea into Beautiful.ai, let it build the first draft, swapped in my branding, and tweaked a few lines. Ready to present in minutes, and it looked better than anything I would have put together myself. If you build pitch decks, proposals, or client presentations, this one is worth trying. Try it at beautiful.ai Partnered with @beautiful_ai

Meta launched Muse today. It is not a chatbot. It sends emails, fills out forms, books travel, negotiates your bills down, and buys things through Stripe. You get one approval screen: the item, the card, the total, Allow. Every user gets their own virtual machine in Meta's cloud with its own browser. A second agent called Sentinel lives inside it and decides what the first one is allowed to touch. Read access and write access are granted separately, per app. Free to start. $20/mo for Power, $100/mo for Max. No ads inside it. US only, on iOS, Android, WhatsApp and the web, with the glasses coming. Here is the part Meta cannot engineer around. They are asking for your inbox, your calendar, your bank and your card. This is the company that settled with the FTC in 2011, 2019 and 2023. Building the agent stopped being the hard part. Permission is the moat now. Follow @rossfledderjohn for more AI related news

OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Images 2.5 and it is already live on every ChatGPT tier. The upgrade people will actually feel is not the sharper output. It is that editing finally holds. Ask for one change and you get one change, and it stays consistent across a long back and forth instead of degrading every turn. What's new: Up to 50 percent faster than Images 2.0 Much better at preserving subjects from your reference photos @Sketch lets you draw your idea right in the chat Templates for formats like Poster and Merch Comments you drop straight onto an image to edit one spot Shareable prompts so someone else can run your idea on their own photos For builders there are two new API models. GPT-Image-2.5 Flare for speed, Sunburst for precision, both at 8 dollars per million image input tokens and 30 out. If you have been holding off on putting image generation into a client workflow, this is the release that makes it worth revisiting. Follow @rossfledderjohn for more AI related news

OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra on September 3 and the benchmark numbers are not the story. The builds are. A 3D turbocharger you can rotate and pull apart, from one prompt. A World of Warcraft inspired browser RPG that a doctor started over his morning coffee and that already plays. A portfolio built inside a working handheld console. A real scale flythrough of the Nurburgring in Blender. A macOS simulator in 75 minutes. A steam train rebuilt as 3,295 editable objects. Theo pointed it at code that already existed and closed 200 pull requests and issues. The shift is not better code. It is that what comes back is a finished thing you can click. Follow @rossfledderjohn for more AI related news