GPT-5.5 (Spud) Doesn't Quite Have the Big Model Smell
GPT-5.5 dropped yesterday under the rumoured codename Spud, and I’ve been hammering on it inside Codex for most of today. I want to say something that probably won’t be popular. It feels a lot like GPT-5.4. That’s not a bad thing exactly, but it’s also not the leap the X timeline had me bracing for. Every leaker for the past month was whispering about big model smell. The general vibe was that OpenAI was about to drag the throne back from Anthropic in one swing. Sam’s strawberry potato tweet didn’t help calm anyone down. By the time the announcement landed, half the AI internet had convinced itself we were getting a generational jump.