If GPT-5.5 Pro really was Spud, and two years of pretraining culminated in one release, WOW, you cannot feel it at all from this announcement. If OpenAI wants to know why they like they’ve fallen behind the vibes of Anthropic, they need to look no further than their marketing department. This makes everything feel like a completely linear upgrade in every way.
Clearly they felt a big backlash when version 5 was released. Now they are afraid of another response like this. And effectively, for the user it will likely only be a small update.
