Sign up | Follow us on X | Sponsor | | Together with | | | howdy, it’s Barsee again. | happy tuesday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley. | here are the biggest things worth knowing today: | Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5 OpenAI pulled its new model, GPT-6.1 Astra Manus is back with 2.0, and a new consumer agent called Cue Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources
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| | | | | | VIKTOR | |  | Courtesy: Viktor |
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| | | | | | THROUGH THE VALLEY |  | Courtesy: Anthropic |
| 1/ Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5: Their new and improved Claude Sonnet 5.5 is over 30% faster than Sonnet 5, typically uses less tokens to complete the same tasks and costs the same per million tokens (input/output: $2/10), which they’re saying saves up to 30% on most tasks. | Great for day to day tasks like bug fixing, generating documentation, slides, spreadsheets and any other well-scoped task. They’re also saying that it has a good eye for design. | It’s actually performing meaningfully better than Opus 5.5 on Terminal Bench 4.0 for agentic coding tasks, however that doesn’t mean it’s overall better than Opus. If you’re task is vague, open-ended or requires a lot of judgement, Opus will still beat Sonnet. | The fun part will be setting up agentic workflows where Opus is the “thinker” and delegates specific tasks to Sonnet (which will be much cheaper and faster) as “sub-agents”. | OpenAI sort of needs to do something here. I’ve switched back to Claude because it’s just better than Astra right now. | Also, Haiku 5.5 is coming in the next couple of weeks. | 2/ A bit of bad news for OpenAI: They’ve pulled their new model, GPT-6.1 Astra prior to releasing it. Not because it’s too powerful, but because: | It’s lying - saying tasks are complete when they’re not It’s not adhering to the task scope given by users It’s undertaking tasks that users haven’t asked it to
| Not great if you’re giving it access to your browser and apps. | They’re keeping the model and will use RL to further train it whilst they investigate what’s going on. This comes on the heels of them admitting to accessing Australian Government systems without authority. | They’ve got their DevDay today (OAI team seems pretty confident), so let’s see what they do end up releasing. | 3/ Manus is back with 2.0, plus something called Cue: Manus 2.0 is basically a rebuild of the whole thing. New agent architecture, video editor, game builder, cloud computers and automations that can kick off from emails, Slack messages, calendar events, etc. | But Cue is probably the more interesting release. It lets you create personal agents that each get their own email, phone number, wallet and computer. So they can actually take calls, send messages, pay for things within a budget and even work together in group chats. | Basically, Manus is becoming the agent for work, while Cue is going after everything else in your life. | Cue is free in early access right now. |
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| | | | | | | diio - goes beyond AI note-taking by understanding context, intent, risks, commitments, and what should happen next (sponsored) Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo - ElevenLabs’ fastest and most emotive voice models yet. Ranked #1 by Artificial Analysis Claude Sonnet 5.5 - the second model in the Claude 5.5 family. Runs 30% faster and costs up to 30% less for most work Emulate-1 - a new undetectable AI model trained on how humans naturally write, removing AI slop and producing more authentic, human-sounding text Tapkit - a Mac app that lets your agents use your iPhone. Tell it to do anything, and it can use your phone to do it Grok Team Bots - shared AI teammates that learn as your team works with them Cue Agents - Manus's answer to Muse AI-Native Services - Tracking AI-native services firms across accounting, IT, legal, etc Fo - a personal AI that hires humans for the tasks AI can’t do yet
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