Highlights #1

It’s April 23, 2026. Today: GPT-5.5, the war in Iran, Nike job cuts, and more.

At noon, OpenAI dropped GPT-5.5, its newest flagship large language model. The release of the model comes almost two months after OpenAI dropped the flagship model GPT-5.4 in March. Since then: The New Yorker released a significant investigation on Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. Anthropic—a competitor to OpenAI—claims to have created a model that’s too powerful to be released to the public. OpenAI released a powerful new model for creating images and claimed it will usher in a “new era of image generation.” Finally, OpenAI turned Codex—an app for developers that allowed them to create code with AI (vibe coding)—into an AI-powered agent for general audiences that can send emails, check messages, and use apps on users’ computers directly.

GPT-5.5 is a good model. OpenAI reports, in particular, that the model is good at “agentic coding, computer use, knowledge work, and early scientific research.” The model scores a 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, three points in front of Claude Opus 4.7—Anthropic’s current flagship model—and GPT-5.4 (which both score a 57). Software developers have been reporting that the model is more efficient and intelligent.

GPT-5.5 is 2x the cost of GPT-5.4, at $5 / 1M input tokens. In my testing, GPT-5.5 did not cost significantly more than GPT-5.4—it looks like the token efficiency improvements cancel out the model’s general price increase. GPT-5.5 is still a significantly cheaper model than Anthropic’s best offerings and poses a real threat to other major AI labs.

Today, President Trump announced a three-week extension of the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. This followed a meeting at the WH between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats.
As of Tuesday, 2,375 people were dead in Iran.
Two independent groups have estimated the cost of the Iran war to be between $28 billion and $35 billion for the United States. Since the start of the war, the U.S. has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles (10x the number it buys each year), more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles ($4M+ each), and other expensive weapons (via The New York Times). Consequently, U.S. officials are concerned about the U.S.’s plans to defend Taiwan in case of an emergency (i.e., a Chinese invasion).
The EU has approved a €90 billion Ukraine loan, giving Ukraine some much-needed funding to help the country in its conflict against Russia.
The Senate has voted to pass a $70 billion funding plan for ICE.
Trump announced a deal with Regeneron to lower the price of its pharmaceutical products. This deal involves selling a cholesterol drug on TrumpRx, the White House’s discounted drug website, and it’s a part of the White House’s drug pricing initiative.
The White House has accused China of stealing U.S. artificial intelligence IP. This comes before a May meeting between President Trump and China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing. The Chinese Embassy in Washington has denied the allegations. This event may affect NVIDIA’s ability to sell GPUs to China—a pressing issue that, earlier this year, forced the creation of an NVIDIA AI GPU black market in China (full of smuggling and corruption).
Nike, down 15.04% in the last month, has announced that it’ll cut around 1,400 jobs. The company claims to have made the layoffs to “streamline workflows.” This decision follows 775 other layoffs in January.

FAQs:

What is Highlights?

This is my newsletter. It’s designed to cover a wide range of topics, but focuses primarily on news in politics, business, and tech (AI).

Will this newsletter be politically biased?

Hopefully not. This newsletter aims to be politically neutral when covering political topics. When possible, I will attempt to use a wide variety of sources (that have different political affiliations).

Was AI used in the creation of this issue?

No. I did not utilize AI while creating this issue.