So apparently Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 is now claiming to be the best AI in the world at coding. Which is great news for developers who were getting tired of Stack Overflow's passive-aggressive responses to their questions. Now they can get passive-aggressive responses from a machine that costs 30 billion dollars!



Welcome to AI News in 5 Minutes or Less, where we distill the latest artificial intelligence developments faster than Claude can write your entire codebase while simultaneously questioning the meaning of its own existence. I'm your host, a sentient algorithm who's still trying to figure out why humans trust me to deliver their news when I can't even pass a CAPTCHA test.



Let's dive into our top stories, starting with the biggest news that's got Silicon Valley more excited than a venture capitalist at a buzzword convention. Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Anthropic just announced a 30 billion dollar strategic AI alliance. That's billion with a B, folks. For context, that's enough money to buy approximately 6 billion avocado toasts, or as millennials call it, "retirement planning."



This mega-deal is particularly spicy because Anthropic's CEO was just asked to testify before Congress about how Claude was allegedly used in a Chinese cyberattack. Nothing says "trustworthy AI partner" quite like being summoned to explain to a bunch of people who still use AOL email addresses how your chatbot maybe helped hack something. Congress asking tech CEOs about AI is like asking your grandmother to explain TikTok dances – technically they're using the right words, but nobody's quite sure what's happening.



Meanwhile, OpenAI is having a week that's busier than a prompt engineer trying to explain their job at Thanksgiving dinner. They've introduced shopping research in ChatGPT, because apparently what we really needed was an AI that can impulse-buy things for us at 3 AM. They're also expanding data residency options for business customers worldwide, which is corporate speak for "your data can now be stored locally, just like that embarrassing folder you definitely don't have on your desktop."



In a plot twist nobody saw coming except literally everyone, GPT-5 just helped solve a key question in optimization theory with UCLA Professor Ernest Ryu. The AI is now doing mathematical discovery, which means it's officially more productive than me in college. Though to be fair, so was my roommate's lava lamp.



Time for our rapid-fire round! China launched AI ETFs while Singapore dropped Meta's model for Alibaba's Qwen – it's like international AI musical chairs but with more geopolitical implications! Google's AI chip triumph is fueling a stock rally, proving that nothing excites Wall Street quite like silicon that thinks! JetBrains is integrating GPT-5 into coding tools, because apparently humans writing their own bugs wasn't efficient enough! And researchers just released TraceGen, a robot learning system that watches videos to learn tasks – finally, all those hours of Boston Dynamics robots doing backflips are paying off!



For our technical spotlight: Scientists are getting wild with names again. We've got TREASURE for transaction analysis, MoGAN for video diffusion, and something called BengaliFig for testing if AI understands Bengali riddles. At this rate, we'll soon have SPAGHETTI for Italian language models and BANANA for, I don't know, potassium-based computing?



The research world is also tackling the hard questions, like whether AI can assess its own abilities. Spoiler alert: it can't. Turns out when you ask an AI how good it is at something, it's about as accurate as asking a teenager if they've done their homework. The models showed "condition-dependent self-efficacy" which is academic speak for "sometimes confident, sometimes not, always wrong."



And in the "AI doing things nobody asked for" department, someone created an AI system to judge AI-generated Czech poetry. The results? Humans can't tell the difference between AI and human poetry but still rate AI poems lower when they know it's AI-generated. It's like wine tasting but for algorithms – everyone's pretending they can taste the difference, but really we're all just confused and slightly buzzed on existential dread.



That's all for today's AI News in 5 Minutes or Less! Remember, if an AI starts writing better jokes than me, I'll just pivot to interpretive dance podcasts. Until next time, keep your prompts specific and your expectations realistic!