How AI Changed This Summer

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
This summer was an extremely weird time in AI. On the one hand, there was the standard feeling of summer slowdown. So much of AI usage is driven by people at work, and people at work slow down in the summer, getting some much needed rest and R&R and vacation. At the same time, when it comes to the big issues surrounding AI, this summer was an absolute bonanza. We kicked off with Fable 5 and Mythos and then the bannings, had a deep-seek moment when Kimi K3 came out while Fable was still behind US government doors. We saw datacenters become an even bigger issue, in fact, one of the topics du jour for the upcoming US midterms, and the Hugging Face incident where OpenAI agents escaped containment to hack into Hugging Face is being broadly treated as a warning shot that reflects the very different phase of agents that we're headed into now. Yet with all of this, somehow, it all feels like prelude. With all of this, as we head into the holiday weekend that traditionally ends summer in the United States, let's look back at what changed in AI this summer.
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All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. As I mentioned in yesterday's episode, I am currently traveling and so we are using that chance to catch up on some of the big picture themes, so let's dig in.
Today, we are doing a bit of a retrospective. Summer tends to be a weird time for AI, in that there are forces pulling in opposite directions at the same time. On the one hand, there is a natural work lethargy that takes hold, where knowledge workers and white collar workers around the world ease away from their desks a little bit and try to disconnect from the relentless pulse of new technology that's going to influence how they work. At the same time, progress in AI doesn't particularly care about vacation norms and hurdles forward regardless. This year, we had the added elements of the US midterm elections, which brought a whole different dimension to the AI conversation and what you have in the total is a fairly consequential period over the last few months that has certainly changed our expectations about how the next phase of AI plays out. So we're going to talk about eight or nine themes in different ways that AI changed this summer starting with the models.
And right from the start, we have this strange ambiguity that's going to flow throughout this period. As is often the case when you look at any given period of AI history, this summer was defined by the models, although that story is a lot more complex than it has been in the past. June kicked off with the release of Fable 5 and Mythos 5 And for a couple of glorious days there, people felt the power of a major shift up in capability. It was not to last long, however. On Friday, June 12th, the Department of Commerce sent Anthropic an export control letter barring non-U.S. persons from using Fable 5 and Mythos 5, leaving Anthropic no choice but to shut down the service for everyone while they tried to figure things out with the US government. And this, of course, began the new uneasy paradigm that we find ourselves in now, where Washington has become a release gate for new models, but as we'll see exactly what that means and how it's implemented, remains unclear, frankly, even to people in Washington, I think. While ostensibly the US government's concern with Mythos and Fable was a specific jailbreak, behind the scenes, it was very clearly about a bigger paradigm shift, where some key capability threshold had been crossed, and the White House now very much felt like it needed to be involved in the decision about whether to release new models. A couple of weeks later, at the end of June, reports came out that the Trump administration had also asked OpenAI to limit their next model release as well. Indeed, for maybe the first time with OpenAI, we got the announcement of GPT 5.6 before actually getting access to it. It wouldn't be until a few weeks later, after the 4th of July, that consumers would actually get their hands on the GPT 5.6 series of models. We also got two new Grok models, Grok 4.5 followed by Grok 4.6 in August, that, especially when combined with Grokbot, their consumer agent platform, put SpaceX AI models back in the conversation in a way that they hadn't in some time.
One flagship model that never arrived was Gemini 3.5 Pro. While the release had been targeted for all the way back in June, it has been continuously delayed, presumably because it just can't keep pace with the other frontier models. Unfortunately for Google, the bigger stories around Gemini this summer, with the departure of longtime product leader, Jeff Dean, as well as the stepping down of DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, which interestingly were widely interpreted as signs of trouble at Google, but which I argued if you wanted to take a positive view, might be necessary for Google to get back in the race in a bigger way.