Rise of Reasoning Models and Tool Use

Today’s episode breaks down a massive new empirical study from OpenRouter and a16z that analyzed more than 100 trillion real-world tokens to reveal what developers and power users are actually doing with AI right now, from the surge in reasoning models to the dominance of coding workloads to the unexpected rise of roleplay in open-source systems. The discussion explores how the shift toward long-context programming tasks, tool-use invocation, and hybrid stacks of closed and open models is reshaping the practical AI landscape and what patterns matter most heading into 2026. Headlines include fresh rumors around GPT-5.2, OpenAI’s UX cleanup efforts, and the latest shake-ups at Apple and Meta.

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