Issue 35: Code Red!

MoE, OpenRouter, Eleanor, Code Dot

Author

Mike Murphy
December 05, 2025

🗞️ AI News of The Week: The OpenAI 'Code Red' Memo Story

Is Sam Altman getting nervous about its AI Competitors?

OpenAI Declares 'Code Red' Amid AI Race Intensification

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued an internal "Code Red" memo (the company's highest urgency level) in response to mounting competitive pressure from Google's Gemini 3 and rivals like Anthropic, which are now outperforming OpenAI in key benchmarks.

  • Competitive Pressure: The move is a direct reaction to Google's Gemini 3 and the growing traction of rivals like Anthropic, which have begun to outperform OpenAI's models in key industry benchmarks.

The company is entering triage mode, halting nearly all non-core initiatives (AI agents, advertising, personal assistants) to focus exclusively on improving ChatGPT's speed, reliability, and user experience. This strategic retreat comes after significant talent loss to competing labs and represents OpenAI's effort to defend its market position in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.


🧠 AI Term of The Week: Mixture of Experts (MoE)

Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a clever way to build giant models without running the whole thing every time. An MoE model contains many small “expert” sub-networks and a gating system that picks just 2-8 of them per query.

  • Trillions of parameters, but only billions active → fast + cheap

  • Powers Mistral, Grok-3, DeepSeek-V3, and rumored GPT-5

  • Why your phone can now run 100B+ class models

Think specialist chefs in a kitchen instead of one overworked generalist.

💬 Quote of the Week:

❝


“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

– Eleanor Roosevelt

🧰 AI Tool of The Week: OpenRouter

One API to rule them all.

OpenRouter lets you access 100+ LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Llama, Mistral, etc.) through a single endpoint and automatically routes your request to the best model for speed or cost.

  • Pay-as-you-go, no subscriptions

  • Built-in fallbacks if a provider is down

  • Often 30-50% cheaper than going direct

  • Works with the standard OpenAI SDK…just swap in one line of code

🛠 What I Made: How To Open VS Code From Terminal with Code Dot

Description:
In this tutorial, you will learn how to open any directory from the Terminal in Visual Studio Code (VS Code) using Code + Period.

🤖 What You'll Learn

  • What is Code + Dot?

  • How To Show All Commands (Shift + Cmd + P)

  • How to install Code Command in VS Code

  • How to uninstall Code Command in VS Code

  • How to Open Directories from Terminal in VS Code

  • Helpful Terminal Commands


Mike Murphy — The AI Handyman 🧰
Helping creators & small businesses turn their content & documents into AI‑powered tools.