November in review: four launches and a retreat in Brussels
The busiest month of announcements this year, and the one where the least changed for a company of thirty people.
November produced four significant model releases and a proposed rewrite of European AI law. For a Swiss SME, the correct number of decisions taken as a result is zero, and that is the month’s actual lesson.
The month in brief
An open-weight reasoning model on the 6th. GPT-5.1 on the 12th. Gemini 3 on the 18th. A European proposal on the 19th to defer the high-risk obligations past August 2026. Claude Opus 4.5 on the 24th.
What the four launches together mean
That the frontier is now a three-way commodity market with open weights close behind, and that the cadence has shifted from generational leaps to point releases.
Both of those favour a buyer who decides and proceeds. Waiting for the field to settle was a defensible posture in 2024. It is now simply a decision not to decide.
What the Brussels news means
That a date this blog told you to note in August is being moved. We said so plainly on the 20th rather than quietly revising it, because a publication that only records its correct predictions is not worth reading.
The underlying position has not changed since October 2024: the high-risk regime was never likely to reach an ordinary Swiss SME, and the durable work is knowing what you use and writing down who decided.
Into December
Three things carry forward, all internal. The handover notes from the 17th. The conversation with your finance lead from yesterday, before the year-end close makes it retrospective. And the one-page record from 28 October, which should be finished this month while the year is still legible.
December is short, the news will be quiet, and the quiet is the point. The most useful month of the year for this subject is usually the one with nothing in it.