Microsoft and OpenAI – the partnership analyzed
The relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI is the most consequential commercial pairing in artificial intelligence, and also one of the most misunderstood. Microsoft does not…
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The frontier of embodied AI
Foundation models. Voice and speech AI. Avatars and synthetic video. Agentic infrastructure. Edge runtimes. And the trust-and-safety surface around them all – analysed by hand, written to last.
Foundation Models
Microsoft and OpenAI – the partnership analyzed
The relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI is the most consequential commercial pairing in artificial intelligence, and also one of the most misunderstood. Microsoft does not own OpenAI. It holds a substantial minority economic interest, has invested a reported total of more…
Continue readingWhat we cover
Seven areas of embodied AI. Each is an ongoing body of work, continuously updated as the field moves.
- Foundation Models Frontier model families and the labs behind them.
- Voice & Speech AI TTS, voice cloning, STT, conversational and call-center AI.
- Avatars & Vision Synthetic video, talking avatars, 3D characters, motion capture.
- Agentic AI Agent frameworks, autonomous coders, RAG and agent infrastructure.
- On-Device & Edge AI Local LLM stack, edge hardware, small open models, on-device privacy.
- Trust & Safety Provenance, deepfake detection, AI governance, safety research.
- Industry Tracker Living trackers – open-source AI weekly, funding monthly.
The model lineage
Eight years of foundation models, in three families. Hover any release to read what it changed.
GPT
GPT-1 Jun 2018 117M params The first decoder-only GPT, trained on BookCorpus. The thesis: pre-train broadly, fine-tune cheaply. Read the analysis → GPT-1 Jun 2018 GPT-2 Feb 2019 1.5B params Coherent long-form generation. Released in stages over misuse concerns. Read the analysis → GPT-2 Feb 2019 GPT-3 May 2020 175B params Few-shot learning from prompt examples. The "scale is enough" bet, vindicated. Read the analysis → GPT-3 May 2020 GPT-3.5 Nov 2022 first RLHF The first RLHF model in the line, and the engine behind the original ChatGPT. Read the analysis → GPT-3.5 Nov 2022 GPT-4 Mar 2023 multimodal Vision input added. OpenAI stops disclosing architecture from here on. Read the analysis → GPT-4 Mar 2023 GPT-4o May 2024 omni Native audio, vision and text through a single shared forward pass. Read the analysis → GPT-4o May 2024 GPT-5 Aug 2025 400K context A unified system that routes between fast inference and deep reasoning. Read the analysis → GPT-5 Aug 2025 GPT-5.5 Apr 2026 MMLU 92.4% Codename Spud. The current flagship as of mid-2026. Read the analysis → GPT-5.5 Apr 2026
Llama
Llama 1 Feb 2023 research-only Leaked publicly within a week, which kick-started the open-weight era. Read the analysis → Llama 1 Feb 2023 Llama 2 Jul 2023 permissive The first genuinely commercial open licence. An accident turned into strategy. Read the analysis → Llama 2 Jul 2023 Llama 3 Apr 2024 8B / 70B Redefined what open models could do at their parameter scale. Read the analysis → Llama 3 Apr 2024 Llama 3.1 Jul 2024 405B · 128K The first open model to genuinely rival the closed frontier on benchmarks. Read the analysis → Llama 3.1 Jul 2024 Llama 4 Apr 2025 MoE · multimodal Scout and Maverick: mixture-of-experts, natively multimodal, 10M-token context. Read the analysis → Llama 4 Apr 2025
Stable Diffusion
SD 1.5 2022 512px The foundational open image model, with a vast derivative ecosystem still alive today. Read the analysis → SD 1.5 2022 SD 2.0 late 2022 OpenCLIP The underrated stumble. Changing the text encoder broke the community contract. Read the analysis → SD 2.0 late 2022 SDXL Jul 2023 1024px The recovery. Larger UNet, base-plus-refiner pipeline, dual text encoders. Read the analysis → SDXL Jul 2023 SD 3 Jun 2024 MMDiT A new transformer backbone, but a rocky initial release on human anatomy. Read the analysis → SD 3 Jun 2024 SD 3.5 Oct 2024 8.1B The return to form, and the current generation as of 2026. Read the analysis → SD 3.5 Oct 2024
Recent essays
ChatGPT API – authentication and pricing
Two things confuse newcomers to OpenAI's platform more than any others: the difference between the ChatGPT product and the API behind it, and how you actually pay for what you…
Google AI Studio – the developer platform
Google AI Studio is Google's free, browser-based entry point to the Gemini family of models: a place to write prompts, tune parameters, test multimodal inputs and walk away with…
Anthropic Claude API pricing analyzed
Claude API pricing follows a simple logic once you see the pattern: you pay per million tokens, separately for what you send (input) and what the model returns (output), and the…
OpenAI Agent Builder analyzed
OpenAI's Agent Builder is a visual, no-code interface for assembling agentic workflows, introduced at DevDay as a canvas-based layer sitting on top of the OpenAI Agents SDK. It…
How accurate is ChatGPT – reliability analysis
ChatGPT is accurate on well-trodden ground and unreliable on specifics. On common knowledge, standard programming patterns, and summarising text you hand it, it produces correct…
Qwen 3 – Alibaba's open model family
Qwen 3 is the current generation of Alibaba Cloud's open-weight large language model family, released under the Apache 2.0 license and positioned by its makers as…
GPT-5 release timeline and expectations
As of early 2025, GPT-5 is not a shipped product with a public release date. What exists is a pattern of statements from OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, a…
Living trackers
Two pieces we republish on a fixed cadence – analyst synthesis, not aggregation.