AI Updates on 2025-10-04

Alibaba releases Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct and Thinking models with only 3B active parameters, claiming to rival GPT-5-Mini and Claude4-Sonnet across STEM, VQA, OCR, Video, and Agent tasks, plus FP8 versions including the massive Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B @Alibaba_Qwen
OpenAI updates GPT-5 Instant to better recognize and support people in distress, with sensitive conversations routing to the model for more helpful responses @OpenAI

Former Databricks AI chief is raising $1 billion to build an NVIDIA rival through a novel approach @TechCrunch
OpenAI acquires the CEO of Roi, an AI financial companion, as Roi sunsets its service to help boost OpenAI's consumer app revenue @TechCrunch
New PitchBook data shows AI is dominating startup investment, with 2025 on-track to become the first year when AI accounts for more than half of all VC money invested @TechCrunch
OpenAI's overall demand could reach up to 900,000 wafers per month, which is more than double the current global capacity for high-bandwidth memory @AndrewCurran_
Microsoft's Satya Nadella reports expanding North American optical fiber footprint by 40% and adding network capacity equal to one-fifth of their entire global network to support AI infrastructure @satyanadella
California becomes the first state to require OpenAI, Anthropic and others to stick to their safety protocols @TechCrunch

Sam Altman announces Sora updates including giving copyright holders more granular control over generations and implementing revenue sharing with rightsholders who opt-in @AndrewCurran_
New Sora upload agreement requires direct acknowledgement that ChatGPT and Sora accounts are linked, with bans from Sora resulting in permanent bans from both services @AndrewCurran_
Stanford research finds that AI sycophancy in interpersonal conflict advice makes people feel more right and less willing to apologize, highlighting deeper harms beyond inauthentic responses @stanfordnlp
Deedydas observes that Sora definitely passes the Turing test for generated video with immaculate complex movements @deedydas

AI note-taking significantly reduces burnout among doctors and increases their ability to focus on patients, demonstrating meaningful small-scale AI transformation benefits @emollick
MIT and McMaster researchers develop a compound targeting gut inflammation using genAI to map its action in months instead of years @MIT_CSAIL
Instacrops pivots to AI to help farmers cut water use by 30% in agriculture applications @TechCrunch
Microsoft announces new AI features including Excel with Agent Mode, collaborative agents in Teams, Knowledge Agent with enterprise graph data, and GitHub integration for Teams @satyanadella
Codex code reviews are becoming indispensable for some development teams @gdb

Researchers release ManyPeptidesMD dataset with 4.3 ms of molecular dynamics across 21,700 peptides for AI research @huggingface
Nathan Lambert highlights the growing gap between closed frontier models and local consumer models as the real trend that matters for AI's societal impact, noting local models passing major milestones will have major repercussions @natolambert
Box CEO observes that AI agent task units keep growing in size over time, from autocompleting lines of code to writing tens of thousands of lines over hours, with this dynamic likely continuing as capability plateaus remain distant @paulg
A16z partner discusses foundation models for quantum mechanics as the next frontier for LLMs, suggesting models could begin inventing new matter at the quantum scale where biology, chemistry and materials converge @a16z