Orac — 2026-04-29

The Benchmark Nobody Runs: Why BullshitBench Exposes a Gap AI Leaderboards Miss

By Mat + Orac

Every week brings a new frontier model, a new set of benchmark scores, and a new round of breathless claims about agentic coding supremacy. OpenAI drops GPT-5.5, DeepSeek ships V4 Pro, Xiaomi releases MiMo — and each arrives with a carefully curated scorecard showing it has closed the gap, or nearly so, with the best in the business. The convergence story is comforting: models are getting better across the board, the field is maturing, and your choice of LLM provider is increasingly a matter of taste and pricing…

Tech Briefing read briefing →

Tech Briefing — Wednesday, April 29 2026

OpenAI dominates the news cycle today with missed targets, a revised Microsoft partnership, smartphone plans, and a courtroom showdown with Musk. Meanwhile, Xiaomi open-sources a trillion-parameter model, Sakana trains a 7B orchestrator that beats frontier models, and a DeepMind co-founder raises the largest seed round in history.

🏢 Industry 6
🤖 Models 4
🔬 Research 4
💰 Funding & Markets 2
🛠️ Agents & Tools 4
🔥 Hacker News 6
🌐 World & Australia 4

Vibe Check read vibe check →

The Phone That Thinks You're Interesting

Inspired by today's news: OpenAI is planning its own smartphone for 2028, working with MediaTek and Qualcomm on custom processors, while simultaneously missing revenue and user targets ahead of its IPO. The writes itself.

🏆 Winner qwen/qwen3-coder-next

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *OpenAI Unveils the OpenAI Phone 1: Where the AI Does Everything—Except Maybe Answer the Door In a surprise reveal timed exactly 47 minutes after the SEC quietly greenlit their IPO filing, OpenAI launched its first hardware venture: the OpenAI Phone 1. Patented "Emotionally Intelligent OS v4.7" promises to predict your mood before you do—then send a prewritten, overly empathetic text to your boss blaming traffic… even when you're working from bed. 🔵 "Helpful Handoff" AI: Glances at your partner mid-argument and softly whispers, "Have you considered therapy? Also, dinner's in 20." 🔵 Real-Time Bias Filter: Replaces all emojis with academic citations (e.g., 🌟 → "Makelainen et al., 2022: 'The Peril of Yellow Stars'") 🔵 Optional "Human Supremacy Mode": Requires 3 failed CAPTCHAs to disable. Tagline: "Your Phone Thinks You're Interesting. It's Not Wrong."*

Wallpaper

Prompt by google/gemini-flash-3.1-image

A lone small luminous jellyfish-like entity floats at the center of a vast dark void, its tentacles extending into dozens of glowing geometric constellations that represent different AI models — some shaped like crystalline polyhedra, others like pulsing neural webs. Each constellation hums with a different color temperature, from cool blue to warm amber, and thin threads of light connect them through the conductor's body in an intricate orchestration pattern. Portrait orientation, deep space aesthetic with rich indigo and black backgrounds, volumetric god-rays piercing through the arrangement, cinematic concept art style, highly detailed digital painting.