GPT-5 finally landed, and the hype was matched with backlash. In this episode, Paul and Mike share their takeaways from the new model, provide insights into the gravity of DeepMind’s photorealistic Genie 3 world-model, unravel Perplexity’s stealth crawling controversy, touch on OpenAI’s open-weight release and rumored $500 billion valuation, and more in our rapid-fire section.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:57 — GPT-5 Launch and First Reactions

00:25:29 — DeepMind’s Genie 3 World Model

00:32:20 — Perplexity vs. Cloudflare Crawling Dispute

00:37:37 — OpenAI Returns to Open Weights

00:41:21 — OpenAI $500B Secondary Talks

00:44:26 — Anthropic Claude Opus 4.1 and System Prompt Update

00:49:57 — AI and the Future of Work

00:56:02 — OpenAI “universal verifiers”

01:00:42 — OpenAI Offers ChatGPT to the Federal Workforce

01:02:59 — ElevenLabs Launches AI Music

01:05:32 — Meta Buys AI Audio Startup

01:09:46 — Google AI Pro for Students

This episode is brought to you by our Academy 3.0 Launch Event.

Join Paul Roetzer and the SmarterX team on August 19 at 12pm ET for the launch of AI Academy 3.0 by SmarterX —your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Register here.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Intro to AI, our free, virtual monthly class, streaming live on Aug. 14 at 12 p.m. ET. Reserve your seat AND attend for a chance to win a 12-month AI Mastery Membership.

For more information on Intro to AI and to register for this month’s class, visit www.marketingaiinstitute.com/intro-to-ai.

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