SOAR (trade startups)

Good new first: Sol is a smart, efficient, and a significant step forward. It is the same price as GPT-5.5. Also launching in the GPT-5.6 family is Terra, with 5.5-level performance at half the price. Bad news: at the request of the US government, it is launching today in limited preview instead of the open access launch we were planning on. We are working with the government to get to general availability as fast as we can. I think it is quite reasonable to roll out models--especially as they reach significant new levels of capability--in this way. It fits with our long-held strategy of iterative deployment. But this isn't quite the process that we think is optimal. Now we will with the government to attempt to get to a transparent, reliable process for early access, and to ensure that as long as our safeguards work as intended we can release widely. We want to be a reliable, dependable partner that works with all stakeholders, and we also want to live by our mission of benefiting all of humanity. I believe the government shares most of our goals, and that they are overall doing a good job in a very difficult situation. We will work as quickly as we can to get this model in your hands and we hope you will love it.

It is very easy to be pessimistic and right. Most ideas are bad. Most markets are too early, too small, too crowded, too hard. You can build an entire worldview around seeing the flaw first, and be rewarded for it over and over again But the strange thing about startups is that the only outcomes that matter come from the places where someone was optimistic and right I used to underestimate how much this matters. But there is a whole world of difference between reacting to the world as it is, and having enough understanding of the world as it is to still stay open to what it could become Long optimism

I talk to so many tech leaders at huge companies every week. One of the most brutal failure patterns for executive teams right now is thinking that AI is like SOC 2 compliance: a new checkbox item that they have to allocate some resources to, to make their governance people happy. They think, we'll get AI "done" in Q3 or Q4 and finally be able to move on to other stuff. What they don't see is that their entire company is going to change shape over the next few years, regardless of what they think, or want. Their current hierarchy will be gone, nearly unrecognizable from what gets rebuilt in its ashes. Everyone will be conducting their business VERY differently from how they do it today. AI not some compliance drill. Leaders need to get in front of this situation before it overwhelms them.