howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy friday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

• OpenAI launches GPT-5.5 to power its AI superapp

• DeepSeek unveils flagship AI model a year after breakthrough

• Sam Altman's digital identity project, just unveiled World ID 4.0

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

PRESENTED BY VIKTOR

Here's what Viktor did for 11 different companies last week

A dental education company runs its backend on Viktor. Crons, reports, customer automations. CEO says it "runs my business behind the scenes."

A business coaching firm uses Viktor as a VA replacement. The founder sends midnight instructions. Viktor executes them before morning.

A 4x4 parts company uses it to chew through the work backlog. A landscaping startup built 63 workflows in two weeks.

A DTC brand uses Viktor for checkout debugging, AP reconciliation, cash flow monitoring, Klaviyo audits, and brand protection. Eleven use cases from one coworker.

An academic tutoring company has Viktor running database enrichment and email campaigns. A marketing agency uses it as an internal team analyzer. A web studio ships client dashboards with it.

One coworker. Every department. Viktor lives in your Slack, connects to 3,000+ tools (Stripe, HubSpot, Google Ads, Klaviyo, Shopify, Linear, Notion, GitHub), and does real work. Not summaries. Not a chatbot.

9,000+ teams. SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.

Start free. $100 in credits →

THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ OpenAI launches GPT-5.5 to power its AI superapp

OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5.5, its newest flagship model and the engine behind the company’s long-awaited AI superapp. The launch comes just seven weeks after GPT-5.4, highlighting an aggressive release pace as competition intensifies. OpenAI says GPT-5.5 and its coding agent Codex helped build the model itself through recursive self-improvement, where AI systems assist in creating stronger successors.

President Greg Brockman said the superapp will roll out in stages, expanding ChatGPT from a chatbot and coding tool into a broader platform for anyone doing computer-based work. OpenAI says GPT-5.5 is stronger at coding, research, data analysis, web browsing, and handling unclear tasks with less guidance, signaling a push toward AI agents that can operate across everyday software instead of only answering prompts.

Benchmark results shared by OpenAI show GPT-5.5 leading GPT-5.4 across most categories, including Terminal-Bench, software engineering, tool use, reasoning, and cybersecurity. GPT-5.5 Pro posts the strongest scores in browsing and advanced math tasks. In direct comparisons with Anthropic Claude Mythos, GPT-5.5 appears ahead on Terminal-Bench, while Mythos holds slight leads on OSWorld-Verified and CyberGym.

GPT-5.5 rolls out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users across ChatGPT and Codex, with GPT-5.5 Pro reserved for Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers.

2/ DeepSeek unveils flagship AI model a year after breakthrough

A year after shaking the AI industry, DeepSeek is back with a new challenge to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The company has released preview versions of V4 Flash and V4 Pro, calling them its most powerful open-source AI systems yet. DeepSeek says V4 delivers major gains in coding, reasoning, and agentic tasks while introducing a Hybrid Attention Architecture designed to better remember context across long conversations. It also expands context length to 1 million tokens, allowing users to input entire codebases or long documents in a single prompt.

The company says the model is built for lower-cost deployment, reinforcing its strategy of offering frontier-level performance at disruptive prices. Pricing could fall further after Huawei launches Ascend 950-powered computing clusters in the second half of the year.

You can test the model at chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode

3/ Sam Altman's digital identity project, just unveiled World ID 4.0

World has unveiled World ID 4.0, a new version of its proof-of-human system designed to verify real people as AI-generated content floods the internet. The platform uses an iris-scanning device called the Orb to create a unique cryptographic identity. The company says more than 18 million users across 160 countries have already enrolled.

World’s biggest signal may be adoption. New partners now include Tinder, Zoom, DocuSign, Shopify, Okta, Amazon Web Services, and Vercel. Tinder is adding verified-human badges. Zoom is testing deepfake checks for video calls. DocuSign plans human verification for signatures.

World also introduced AgentKit, a system that lets AI agents prove they are acting for a verified human, showing how identity infrastructure could become a core layer of the AI economy.

PRESENTED BY AMD

Still debugging at 3AM? Come fix that.

AMD AI DevDay happening April 30th in SF is where developers get hands-on with ROCm, optimize real AI workloads, and learn how to scale without lock-in.

Talk to the engineers. Test the stack. Build something better.

Spots are going fast so grab yours now.

Register Now

TRENDING TOOLS

• Beams by Teleport — Securely deploy and experiment with agents in an isolated Firecracker VM with built-in identity. No secrets, no IAM wrestling ^_(sponsored)

• Sinceerly > the anti-Grammarly. Be sinceerly human with AI

• noscroll > an AI that doomscrolls X for you and texts only the signal, skipping the noise

• Draftboard > the world’s first AI Sales Director built to outperform any human

• Cappy > an AI video editor you can text

• Reloop Animation Studio > turns a script into a full AI-generated video ad, with end-to-end character and scene consistency

• AirJelly > watches what you're working on and flags overdue tasks plus unresolved intents before you even ask

• ChatGPT for Excel and Google Sheets > now in beta, letting users build new sheets, fix formulas, explain models, and update workbooks directly in place

• SpeakON > a MagSafe wearable providing instant AI dictation and app-aware text input without unlocking your phone

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

• Sign of the future: GPT-5.5

• What will be scarce?

• Meta to cut 10% of staff as it pours billions into AI

• Unitree released a version of the G1 with wheels

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

Thank you for reading today’s edition. That’s all for today’s issue.

💡 Help me get better and suggest new ideas at [email protected] or @heyBarsee

👍️ New reader? Subscribe here

Thanks for being here.

REACH 100K+ READERS

Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us

Sponsor AI Valley and reach over 100,000+ entrepreneurs, founders, software engineers, investors, etc.

If you’re interested in sponsoring us, email [email protected] with the subject “AI Valley Ads”.