The second edition, and the first to hang on a single release. GPT-5.2 Thinking beats human experts on GDPval at under 1% of their cost, and the issue reads the result as a price story rather than a capability one — the premium on cognitive drudgery ending, reasoning deflating 390x in a year.
Two qualifications keep it from being triumphalist. The frontier is spiky: different models still lead on different work, so the win is uneven. And Logan Kilpatrick’s line — that superintelligence likely arrives as existing weights unlocked by better scaffolding, not as a new model — relocates progress from the weights to the harness.
It closes on the final refactor of the physical world, and the rest of the issue is that refactor: world models, in-house silicon, Utah rare earths, micro-factories, satellites, and the first attempts to legislate the phase shift.