AI: 1, Albo: 0

Hi there,

AFL Grand Final tommorrow! Dockers or Lions?

What I'm Seeing in AI

Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol

Both Anthropic and OpenAI released new models this week. Anthropic's Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol are both aimed at making serious AI work faster and cheaper.

Launch video: Claude on X.

I'm a Claude guy, so I've spent more time with Opus. I have had the three most productive days of my life this week since I’ve been using it. I'd give it a line of direction and it would go off for hours and complete massive pieces of work perfectly, and ask me when it wasn’t sure.

It feels slightly smarter, but the bigger change is fewer mistakes and less back-and-forth. The same for GPT-6 Sol, although I don’t find it to be as big of an upgrade.

I've said for a while that I think we've had AGI in a rough form already. The intelligence is there. The next step is making it cheaper and easier for ordinary people to use well.

We’re now going from mind-blowing demos → mind blowing work.

Give Back My Centrelink

Albo got on stage yesterday to announce that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to a public-facing Medicare statistics portal and accessed some non-public files, all the way back in June!!!

The government says it doesn't believe individual medical data was accessed, and the investigation is still going, however it’s crazy to me that we’re only hearing this now.

I think Australia is entirely underprepared for AI, our systems are ancient and our government moves slower than a sloth.

What I'm Building

Getting Hourglass on Social Media

Our two marketing interns, Matt and Frank joined this week to help make more content, and we put out our first video this week. Not too chuffed about having my face all over the internet, but I think it’s good to start getting our company out there.

I want us to be one of the best AI companies in Australia. We've spent so much time getting good at what we do, now it’s time for our distribution to match.

We’re aiming for the media around Hourglass to have the same level of taste as the product: good filming, good stories, and something you'd actually want to watch.

When you can make anything with AI, distribution matters most. You can make a great thing and still have nobody know it exists. We're going to put a lot more of the real work out there and see what happens.

Focusing and Doing Less

Yesterday I gave the new Claude model a short instruction: “make a dashboard to view our internal AI usage”. It found the logins of our 8 different subscriptions, made a clean visual, and even created a cool leaderboard. Without any extra input.

More capable AI makes it very easy to do more work that doesn't matter. Context switching becomes so easy, and before you know it you’re stressing over making a random dashboard, whilst also managing 12 other things.

It’s so easy to fill time with another task, or scroll, or commitment. I wrote an article Do Less, about my experience trying to focus and cut out the urge to keep doing more.

I'm trying to leave enough space to think, be creative, and choose the work worth doing. AI helps when it gives me some of that time back. 

If you've tried either of the new models this week, what changed in your actual work?

If someone you know would enjoy this, feel free to forward it to them.

See you next Friday,

Finlay

Explore the rest of my writing here → finlayekins.com/writing

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