THE DECODER

2026-10-27

COMPANIES · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

OpenAI delivers partner pages to ChatGPT as pre-generated summaries, prioritized over raw web snippets

Research reporting in The Decoder finds that ChatGPT does not fetch partner pages live but instead receives them as pre-generated summaries placed ahead of other web results in the prompt; ordinary web pages are provided as raw text snippets. An analysis of 1,000 cases by Konitzny showed the summaries named ~70% of entries in positions 1–3 but only ~23% in positions 7–10, and a separate Hamburg study found Springer content appears more often in the web interface than via the API; partners are not always cited correctly.

7.0

2026-10-20

MODELS · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

Cloudflare previews Clairic, a document-extraction model for Workers AI

Cloudflare released Clairic in preview on Workers AI, an AI model that extracts named fields from documents in a single pass (returning values, formats and confidence scores) and which the company says is faster and cheaper than using LLMs; open weights are slated to follow. Cloudflare notes Clairic can perform simple calculations and forecasts but currently isn't reliable for longer calculation chains and is intended to run in chains alongside other System One models like Jev, Clef and GLM-5.3.

7.0

2026-10-11

MONEY · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

Falling AI token prices drive higher compute demand, echoing Jevons' paradox

Data from Ornn, Silicon Data, and Bloomberg (as of Aug 2026), cited by a16z, show declining AI token prices coinciding with steady or rising NVIDIA H100 rental rates. Cheaper tokens are unlocking more agentic automation and applications and expanding volume faster than per‑unit costs fall, but it's unclear how much demand is human versus agent-driven; if usage growth slows, hardware suppliers, cloud providers, and energy companies could face significant downside, a sensitivity already reflected in market moves after reports of weaker OpenAI revenue.

7.0

2026-10-03

COMPANIES · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushes back on religious analogies for AI models

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is uncomfortable with people ascribing religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, calling it a "real safety issue." His remarks follow a New York Times piece on Anthropic's outreach to religious leaders and a referenced statement from "Pope Leo XIV" that "algorithms lack the spark of humanity," while Altman has previously used spiritual phrasing about AI (e.g., "magic intelligence in the sky" and references to the film Her).

4.0

2026-09-27

MODELS · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

OpenAI says most research is focused on GPT‑7 and beyond

Boris Power, OpenAI's Head of Applied Research, told THE DECODER that roughly 80–90% of the company's research is aimed at future model generations such as GPT‑7, GPT‑8 and beyond, because those generations deliver the largest value; incremental within-generation updates are treated as short-term, tactical bets. Power also said user onboarding remains a major challenge — future models (GPT‑6 and later) should better surface capabilities and accept goals more naturally than current versions.

7.0

2026-09-17

CODING · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

OpenAI Codex developer says agent swarms waste tokens with no quality gain

Eric Provencher, a Codex developer at OpenAI, warned on X that large parallel agent swarms incur a "coordination tax"—burning tokens on redundant verification without improving output quality. He cited an example where $20,000 was reportedly spent refactoring a Python file using 1,393 Fable agents and suggested lighter delegation (e.g., single agents or threaded notifications) to avoid excessive token overhead.

5.0