Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Wednesday, September 23, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
The AI model war just shifted into a different gear. OpenAI dropped GPT-6 — Sol and Luna — smarter than anything in the 5.6 family, better alignment, better coding, and half the cost per token. That's a real move. Hours earlier, xAI put out Grok 4.7, which Elon openly admitted sits third on agentic coding benchmarks. Doesn't matter — it's faster, cheaper, and now inside Tesla vehicles. The race is bifurcating: OpenAI owns capability and price, xAI is playing the workhorse tier. Watch that dynamic.
The bigger story is the White House launching Trump TV while locking traditional press out of a presidential address. ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX all boycotted in solidarity — that almost never happens. Newsom called it authoritarianism, Marjorie Taylor Greene called it a First Amendment own-goal. The Paramount-Skydance merger settlement running alongside this isn't coincidental. It's the same question: who controls the information stack.
Congress, meanwhile, is largely choosing not to look. More tomorrow.