Leave Claude set on Opus 5.5 Medium. If you want the best blend of performance price brains and brawn, Anthropic pulled off something magical with Opus 5.5. It’s an extremely smart model, but it is also a parsimonious model. In the Artificial Analysis benchmarks, Opus 5.5 parallels the capabilities of Fable 5.1 in terms of…
It’s two weeks to one of the biggest events of the year, the annual Marketing AI Conference, MAICON, put on by SmarterX. Which means today, right now, is the perfect day to get your COVID and flu boosters if you’re planning to attend. Most vaccines take at least a week to ramp up, and you…
Use AI at the peak of the previous best. If you want to get the most benefit out of AI without expending the most resources (and cost), here’s a simple rubric for you to remember: use AI at the maximum level of the previous generation. For example, Anthropic released Opus 5.5 yesterday. Record-breaking performance, faster,…
What’s going on with AEO/GEO/AI Visibility/etc.? This week, Ashley Zeckman invited me to come share my POV at the annual Spotlight Summit, and in a blisteringly fast 25 minutes, I walked folks through the three stages of GEO, how agentic is changing search, and the two platforms that provide REAL AI visibility measurements AND are…
_Almost Timely News: 🗞️ The Road to MAICON 2026 (2026-10-11) :: View in Browser_ The Big Plug ✍️ Enroll in my new course, AI for Writers and learn how to make AI write better. My Unofficial LinkedIn Algorithm Guide is updated for October 2026! 👉 Get the free version here. 👉 Get the paid version…
Summary In today's episode, I walk through the latest developments in agentic AI assistants and break down the five levels of AI enablement along with the risks and opportunities they create. Here's what this means for you. You gain a practical framework for evaluating and safely deploying autonomous AI tools without sacrificing your data or…
How do we make better AI tools? This is the hottest topic right now in the field because model makers are saying they need to slow down the development of new models in the USA while it’s full steam ahead everywhere else in the world, particularly China. When it comes to making AI smarter, there’s…
Lexical? Semantic? Both! Two words that you should be thinking about as you use AI, in particular for larger projects where you have multiple documents, are lexical and semantic. These are the kinds of searches that AI, with the appropriate support tools, can use to dramatically reduce token usage AND generate better results. Lexical search…
