Anthropic ships Claude Opus 4 — tops SWE-bench, adds extended thinking
Posted 2026-05-23 · Review by 2026-07-23
Claude Opus 4 takes #1 on SWE-bench Verified. Extended thinking and parallel tool use make it the strongest coding agent model available.
Signal, not noise
The AI world, made legible.
The Landscape
All 16 debates →The forces shaping AI — ranked by Overall importance.
1 95 2 90 3 88
Bubble or supercycle?
Money & PhysicsIs the $800B+ of AI infrastructure a rational, telecom-style build-out — or a self-referential bubble inflating on its own balance sheets?
Jobs: white-collar bloodbath or augmentation?
Human StakesDoes AI eliminate knowledge work — especially entry-level — or expand it?
The ROI / productivity paradox
Money & PhysicsEveryone is buying AI; almost no one can prove it's working. Is the gap a measurement lag or a value mirage?
Frontier
Full frontier →The live edge — what's cutting edge right now.
Claude Code
Anthropic
Terminal-native agent that consistently ranks #1 across independent benchmarks; works in terminal, IDE and browser.
Claude Cowork
Anthropic
Desktop agent for macOS and Windows that edits files, organises folders, synthesises research and runs scheduled multi-step tasks in a privacy-first sandbox.
Claude Opus 4.8
Anthropic
The current flagship (with Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5); at or near the top for complex multi-file coding and long-context technical work, and the most natural for prose.
Cursor
Cursor
The leading AI-native IDE and daily driver; Cursor 3 shipped Build in Parallel and Composer 2.5.
Gemini 3.1 Pro
Leads most published reasoning benchmarks and has the cheapest output among the majors; paired with Gemini Spark for long cloud tasks.
Granola
Granola
The bot-free favourite of VCs and consultants; captures audio locally on a Mac with no bot in the participant list.
From The Wire
All dispatches →OpenAI deprecates Sora — exits the consumer video race
Posted 2026-04-26 · Review by 2026-09-26
Sora 2 is officially deprecated. The API shuts down 24 September 2026. OpenAI is refocusing on enterprise video tooling.
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Frontier
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The Wire
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The full, searchable list of every major AI application.
Stacks
Tool combinations that work together — curated by profession and industry.
Learning
What to learn, and in what order — courses, programmes and concepts mapped to the competency you need.
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