Weekly Dose of Optimism #179

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to the 179th Weekly Dose of Optimism!

We started writing the Weekly Dose during the 2022 bear market because there was a disconnect between the incredible things we saw being built and the (largely market-driven) pessimism. So this week is great. We were born in the darkness.

Even as the markets have vomited, the innovation has continued apace. Zoom out.

We have another jam-packed week of optimism, including four Extra Doses below the fold for not boring world members.

Let’s get to it.

Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by… Guru

Your team is probably already using AI for everything: research, customer support, product decisions. Just one problem… AI is confidently wrong about your company knowledge 40% of the time.

While everyone races to deploy more AI tools, they’re building on a foundation of outdated wikis, scattered documents, and tribal knowledge that was never meant to power automated decisions.

Guru solved this for companies like Spotify and Brex. They built the only AI verification system that automatically validates company knowledge before your AI agents use it. Think of it as quality control for your AI’s brain.

The companies that figure this out first will have AI that actually works. The ones that don’t waste valuable human time cleaning up expensive mistakes.

(1) Introducing Claude Opus 4.6 and Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex

Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively

The race between Anthropic and OpenAI to build the smartest, most useful thinking machines is heating up, and it’s riveting. The day after Anthropic released its Super Bowl commercials, which make fun of OpenAI for planning to introduce ads into its product (which many people, including Jordi Hays, think are a bit deceptive, but which are super entertaining)…

… both companies dropped their newest, smartest models. Anthropic released Opus 4.6 and OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex (Codex is its coding model/app).

Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 is for everyone: better at coding, plans longer, runs financial analyses, does research, etc… I’ve been playing with it and it’s definitely smarter (although thankfully it’s still a shitty writer).

OpenAI’s very-OpenAI-named GPT-5.3-Codex is for coding. It slots right into the Codex app they released this week. I had 5.2 build a website for not boring, and it was very cool that it could build it, but no matter how hard I prompted, the design was trash. I told 5.3 to throw out that trash and