February could be the biggest month yet in AI releases. That’s what the news is saying, but I’m not too sure.
Anthropic is out of the gate first with Opus 4.6, a slight improvement to 4.5. I say slight, but having trialled it, I can already detect an improvement. Easily my fave model at the moment.
OpenAI has responded with 5.3 Codex, their code editor. I don’t use it, so can’t really comment. Perhaps today I’ll have a play.
A surprise entry is Composer 1.5. This is Cursor’s own model, and already I love it. It’s focussed purely on code generation, and while not as “smart” as the flagship models like Opus or Gemini 3 Pro, it is about 15x faster. For a lot of use cases, that is exactly what you want, and it’s currently 50% off. I think I’m going to be using it a lot over these coming weeks.
There are rumours Google and XAi will feel the heat and release something as well to stay relevant; we will have to wait and see. Plus the technical world is going goo-goo over OpenClaw, a wrapper that allows AI agents to take over your computer, automating tasks such as email reply and messaging. I haven’t touched it, and won’t, but a lot of people seem excited by it.
The only team that is missing from this list is Meta, who after spending a fortune on talent have been very quiet. Will we see something new soon? So much money for no to zero ROI is going to start being reflected in the share price soon; if Zuck won’t act, his board might make him.
Interesting times.