Hi tech & AI enthusiasts, this week's highlights:
Anthropic Just Doubled Claude's Usage Limits
ChatGPT's Default Model Just Got an Upgrade
Thinking Machines Built an AI That Can Interrupt You
The Lab: How to Use ChatGPT Inside Excel and Google Sheets
AI Image of the Week for: Travel brand campaigns
Let’s get into it.
▲ AI MODELS
Anthropic doubled the usage limits on Claude Code for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans and lifted the peak-hours throttle. Behind it is a new compute deal with SpaceX worth 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
What you need to know
Double the 5-hour limits: Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise users get twice the daily Claude Code usage. The peak-hours reduction on Pro and Max is gone too.
Big jump in API rate limits: API limits for Claude Opus models have been raised considerably, easing the bottleneck that has frustrated paid users for months.
A SpaceX compute deal underwrites it: Anthropic gets all the capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data centre, more than 300 megawatts coming online this month. There is also early talk of orbital AI compute.
Key Ideas
▲ Why it matters: Claude rate limits have been the loudest user complaint of the last quarter, and the main reason a lot of teams have been going back to ChatGPT. This is Anthropic's answer. With 5GW from Amazon, 5GW from Google, $30B from Microsoft, and now SpaceX's GPUs, the compute crunch that has been throttling Claude's heaviest users is easing.
▲ AI MODELS
OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.5 Instant as the new default model in ChatGPT. Smarter, shorter, less hallucination, and noticeably fewer emojis.
What you need to know
Cuts hallucinations by half: OpenAI's internal evals show 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims on high-stakes prompts (medicine, law, finance) compared to the previous default.
Responses are 30% shorter: Uses 30.2% fewer words and 29.2% fewer lines per answer, with a tone OpenAI calls "informal, practical, and workplace-safe."
Better personalisation: Pulls from past chats, uploaded files, and connected Gmail to give more tailored answers. Rolling out to Plus and Pro first, then Free, Go, Business, and Enterprise.
Key Idea
▲ Why it matters: The default model is what most people use, even paying customers. Upgrading it is the biggest change OpenAI can make to user experience. The "fewer emojis, fewer words" angle also reads as a deliberate pivot away from the over-friendly, over-explained voice that ChatGPT has drifted into.
▲ AI RESEARCH
Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines released a research preview of TML-Interaction-Small, a model that handles audio, video, and text in a single continuous stream. It can interrupt, backchannel, and react to what it sees before you finish talking.
What you need to know
0.4 second response time: Replaces traditional turn-taking with "micro-turns" that process 200ms chunks of audio, video, and text simultaneously. Roughly 3x faster than GPT Realtime 2.0.
Reacts to what it sees, not just hears: It can count your push-ups by watching, correct mispronunciations in real time, or flag a bug as you type.
Built around collaboration, not autonomy: Most AI labs are racing to make models more autonomous. This one is built for keeping a human in the loop, talking and acting together.
Key Idea
▲ Why it matters: This is the first credible move past the chat-and-wait model that every AI tool currently runs on. If conversation with an AI can happen at the speed of conversation with a person, the use cases shift fast: live tutoring, real-time translation, coaching, sales-call assistance, and anything else that needs the model to be present rather than queried.
▲ EVEN MORE NEWS
Other big ideas from the past week.
▲ Google's Android Show: Gemini Goes Everywhere: Google announced Gemini Intelligence for Android, plus a new line of Googlebook laptops built with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Features include a Gemini-powered cursor, Create My Widget, and Rambler (turning rambling speech into polished text). Laptops ship this autumn.
▲ Isomorphic Labs Raises $2.1B for AI Drug Discovery: Google's drug discovery spin-out raised $2.1B Series B led by Thrive Capital. CEO Demis Hassabis said "the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health." Investors include Alphabet, MGX, Temasek, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.
▲ ChatGPT Lands in Excel and Google Sheets: An add-on for both Excel and Google Sheets powered by GPT-5.5. It analyses messy data, writes formulas, and updates spreadsheets without leaving the file. Tutorial below.
The Lab
▲ AI EDUCATION
ChatGPT now works as an add-on inside both Excel and Google Sheets, powered by GPT-5.5. You describe what you need in plain English and it builds, analyses, or updates the spreadsheet directly inside the file.
What you'll learn:
How to install the add-on in Excel and Google Sheets
How to build a spreadsheet from scratch using plain-language prompts
How to run scenario and what-if analysis without rebuilding formulas
How to fix errors, explain inherited formulas, and clean messy data
🔬 Interested in learning about AI for business? Join The Lab waitlist.
▲ AI IMAGE SHOWCASE
Create this type of image with Midjourney
Vintage travel poster of London , elegant typography saying "London" in the style of art deco, mid-century modern design with flat colors, bold clean lines, vector illustration.Image Usage Suggestion: Travel brand campaigns, hospitality and hotel marketing, editorial features, event posters, agency portfolio pieces, or any content that needs a confident, timeless visual identity.
💌 Reply to this email with your AI image generation or suggestion of what you’d like to see and I'll feature it in a future newsletter.
▲ SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Help shape the content you see here by giving feedback
Have specific feedback or want to get in touch? Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you.
Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it to a friend and have them sign up here.
Thanks for reading, until next time.
Stay curious,
Matt Lok, Editor
Brought to you by Metalabs. Digital marketing consulting specialising in AI.