ChatGPT 5.6 has been announced. I’m done…

TL;DR

• 1

  Frontier models are now gated: ChatGPT 5.6 beats Mythos on benchmarks at one-third the cost, but regular users are locked out while 20 hand-picked companies get exclusive access.

• 2

  Government and executives now pick winners: The US government and OpenAI executives decide who gets access to the most powerful technology ever created, replacing meritocracy with cronyism.

• 3

  The permanent underclass is forming: Those with frontier intelligence access will dominate everyone else, like a boxer with bricks on their hands fighting someone with hands tied behind their back.

• 4

  Local AI is your hedge: Building your own AI lab with local models gives you sovereign intelligence that governments and executives cannot gate or take away.

• 5

  Three hardware tiers for local AI: Mac Studios for large models with high memory, DGX Spark for plug-and-play medium models, and RTX 5090/6000 Pro for lightning-fast inference on smaller models.

• 6

  Broad access might come by July: PolyMarket betting suggests Fable 5 returns by July 17, and OpenAI says 5.6 will be available broadly in the coming weeks.