Calm is a system: how to handle the AI release firehose
· 1 min read
Two frontier AI models went public yesterday. Same day.
GPT-5.6 cleared the government’s first-ever frontier AI review and shipped to everyone. Grok 4.5 opened public access, priced to undercut the field.
Add Claude Sonnet 5 last week and that’s three “best model ever” launches in ten days.
If you’re a tech leader feeling behind right now, I want to tell you something: feeling behind is the trap.
The instinct is to treat every major release like a strategy offsite. Convene the group. Re-litigate the whole stack. Panic a little.
Do that at this cadence and you’ll spend the entire year evaluating and never ship anything.
What I’ve learned running a tech function: decide once how you evaluate a new model. What you test it on, which real workflow, and what “good enough to switch” actually looks like.
Then every release stops being a fire drill and becomes a 30-minute experiment.
The models will keep coming faster than you can react to them. Your only real defense is a boring, repeatable way to react.
Calm is a system, not a personality trait.
How are you handling the release firehose: testing every drop, or tuning it out?
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
Have a different take? I’d like to hear it. Get in touch.