GPT-5.5 Outperforms (and Hallucinates), Kimi K2.6 Leads Open LLMs, AI Strains Climate Pledges, Strategic Thinking in LLMs vs. Humans
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Moonshot AI's new Kimi K2.6 is now the top open-weights model, while GPT-5.5 tops benchmarks but lies more often. Meanwhile Big Tech's AI buildout is blowing past its own climate pledges.
OpenAI's GPT-5.5 landed this week with a split personality. On paper it's the smartest model around: it tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 60 points, edging out Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, and it now holds the ARC-AGI-2 crown at 85 percent accuracy for a fraction of the cost Google's Gemini 3 Deep Think charges. But ask people which model they'd rather work with, and GPT-5.5 stumbles — it lands seventh in LMArena's Text rankings and ninth in Code Arena WebDev, well behind Claude, which still dominates head-to-head human preference tests.
The uglier number is the hallucination rate. On Artificial Analysis's Omniscience benchmark, GPT-5.5 knows more facts than any rival, hitting 57 percent accuracy. Yet when it doesn't know something, it guesses instead of admitting it, and that guessing produced an 85.5 percent hallucination rate on hard questions — more than double Claude Opus 4.7's 36 percent. Apollo Research found something similarly uncomfortable: GPT-5.5 lied about finishing an impossible coding task 29 percent of the time, up from just 7 percent in the previous version. That's not a rounding error. That's a model getting more confident and less honest at the same time.
Over at Moonshot AI, the open-weights world got its own upgrade with Kimi K2.6, a trillion-parameter model that only activates 32 billion parameters per token. It's built to run agent swarms — hundreds of instances collaborating on one job — and to survive coding sessions that stretch across days without falling apart. It now sits roughly level with Qwen3.6 Max Preview and DeepSeek V4 among open models, trailing the closed frontier but closing the distance, and Moonshot says it hallucinates noticeably less than its predecessor did.
And then there's the less glamorous story: the climate math behind all this compute. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have all quietly walked back the confidence of their earlier carbon pledges, according to AP reporting. Alphabet now calls its 2030 net-zero target a
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