AI Updates on 2025-11-14

AI Model Announcements

  • OpenAI releases GPT-5.1 in their API with new reasoning options and adaptive reasoning capabilities for instant responses, though some users note regressions in certain tasks like the pelican example compared to GPT-5 @simonw
  • Perplexity makes GPT-5.1 available to Pro and Max subscribers @perplexity_ai
  • Alibaba ships Qwen Code v0.2.1 with major improvements including free web search (2000 searches/day for OAuth users), smarter code editing with fuzzy matching, better IDE integration, and multi-stage normalization pipeline for zero-overhead matching @Alibaba_Qwen
  • OpenAI launches group chats in ChatGPT as a pilot in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, enabling collaboration with friends, family, or coworkers alongside ChatGPT in the same conversation @OpenAI
  • Google announces SIMA 2, a general agent that can understand and reason about complex instructions and complete tasks in simulated game worlds, even ones it has never seen before, learning through self-play @demishassabis
  • Google AI Plus expands to 53 additional countries, making productivity and creativity tools available in 130 regions worldwide @GeminiApp
  • Google rolls out Deep Research update to all Gemini app users on mobile (Android and iOS), allowing users to select sources, enter prompts, and generate reports @GeminiApp
  • Claude API now supports structured outputs through native tool support, eliminating the need for previous workarounds using single tool calls with schemas @simonw

AI Industry Analysis

  • Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines Lab is in early talks to raise funding at a valuation of roughly $50 billion, more than 4x its valuation from a few months ago @shiringhaffary
  • Disney CEO indicates plans to deploy AI not just in production processes but across the entire company, including for generative short-form user-created content on Disney+ platform, signaling Disney's transformation into an AI company @AndrewCurran_
  • Analysis suggests Disney's hard-nosed YouTube negotiations may be pressure tactics by Google to push Disney to choose Veo over Sora as their AI partner @AndrewCurran_
  • A new category of startups called "Neolabs" emerges in Silicon Valley, with 9 out of 10 achieving $1B+ valuations at seed stage, likely under $10M in revenue, founded by ex-model lab AI researchers who have made $10-100M+ in personal wealth @deedydas
  • Venture capitalists are abandoning old rules for a "funky time" of investing in AI startups, reflecting changing investment patterns in the AI sector @TechCrunch
  • Harvey, built by a first-year legal associate, becomes one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, demonstrating AI's impact on the legal industry @TechCrunch
  • Cisco acquires EZDubs, a speech translation technology company, to embed their technology in Cisco's videoconferencing products for use by millions @snowmaker
  • NVIDIA GPU rental rates for H100 and A100 have stabilized after price drops over spring and summer @a16z
  • Gamma CEO Grant Lee emphasizes that real product market fit beats brute force marketing, noting their growth came from organic word of mouth rather than advertising spend @a16z

AI Ethics & Society

  • AI Now Institute releases report "Fission for Algorithms: The Undermining of Nuclear Regulation in Service of AI" examining how nuclear regulation is being compromised to serve AI infrastructure needs @AINowInstitute
  • Anthropic's Amanda Askell discusses the challenge of making Claude approach political topics fairly, suggesting existing norms around respect and professionalism can inform how AI models should navigate these issues @AmandaAskell
  • Anthropic releases open-source political bias evaluation materials to promote transparency in AI model behavior @AnthropicAI
  • Apple updates App Review Guidelines to clamp down on apps sharing personal data with third-party AI systems @TechCrunch
  • A federal judge denies Apple and OpenAI's motions to dismiss Elon Musk's antitrust lawsuit @AndrewCurran_
  • Perplexity's Comet Assistant introduces transparency features showing exactly what actions it's taking, asking permission before sensitive actions like logging in or completing purchases, and allowing users to control browsing behavior @perplexity_ai
  • Francois Chollet outlines the "ladder of intelligence" from memorization to metacognition, arguing that achieving compounding AI requires reaching Level 4 (discovering general principles and metacognition) through symbolic program synthesis rather than parametric learning @fchollet
  • Ethan Mollick raises concerns about expectations for open weights models keeping pace with closed ones, citing rising costs without clear revenue paths, government pressure on capable systems, and questioning long-term viability of Chinese frontier models remaining open @emollick

AI Applications

  • OpenAI confirms Sora cameos already work with fictional characters at a high level, requiring only IP permission for use @AndrewCurran_
  • Claude Code's new front-end design Skill improves vibe-coded apps by considering audience and moving beyond default purple gradients and Arial fonts @emollick
  • GPT-5 Pro proves incredibly useful for social science research, allowing researchers to analyze datasets and papers, check work, perform alternative specifications, and verify findings through provided code and statistical results @emollick
  • Claude Code combined with Playwright MCP creates a powerful combination for development tasks @brian_lovin
  • Microsoft demonstrates "vibe coding" enabling anyone, regardless of experience, to build apps using AI assistance @Microsoft
  • Microsoft Copilot introduces Learn Live featuring Mico, an AI study buddy that helps break down complex ideas and maintain focus @Copilot
  • Google Photos launches six new AI-powered features for editing, creating, and searching, including Nano Banana for photo remixing @GoogleAI
  • Google Shopping integrates directly into Gemini App for convenient holiday shopping, with agentic AI features including checkout and calling stores for availability @GoogleAI
  • NotebookLM receives major updates including custom video overview styles, chat history, images as sources, and Deep Research capabilities @GoogleAI
  • ChatGPT now respects custom instructions to avoid using em-dashes in responses @sama

AI Research

  • Google DeepMind's SIMA 2 demonstrates ability to play games in the mind of Genie 3, showing advanced agent capabilities in procedurally generated worlds @demishassabis
  • ChatGPT demonstrates ability to recognize when problems are too difficult to solve, as evidenced by reading MathOverflow posts and declining to attempt overly complex problems @aryehazan
  • Reuters reports that OpenAI offered to collaborate with DeepMind on AI research in 2019 but was rejected, with speculation that an "OpenMind" collaboration could have significantly advanced timelines @AndrewCurran_
  • Stanford researchers introduce new AI model for computer vision that recognizes object parts, understands their function, and transfers skills between objects, advancing toward real-world usefulness @StanfordHAI
  • An LLM-generated paper reaches top 17% of ICLR submissions by average reviewer score (receiving two 8's) despite containing BS jargon and hallucinated references, though one reviewer gave it a zero after actually reading it @micahgoldblum
  • Ethan Mollick notes custom system prompts may degrade LLM results without users knowing, as accuracy improvements are being built into models rather than requiring prompt engineering @emollick
  • Google's Android team reports moving from C++ to Rust yields 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density (1 per 5M lines), 4x lower rollback rate, and 25% less time in code review @deedydas
  • Francois Chollet argues that all great scientific breakthroughs are forms of symbolic compression, taking complex observations and reducing them to simple rules expressed as mathematical equations @fchollet
  • MIT announces new platform for designing metal compositions with previously unattainable properties, representing an entirely new approach to making metals @MIT
  • Andrej Karpathy expresses excitement about self-driving technology's potential to terraform outdoor physical spaces, reduce parking infrastructure, improve safety, decrease noise pollution, and free up human attention from lane following @karpathy