AI Updates on 2025-12-24

AI Model Announcements

  • NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano is now available as a fully managed, serverless model on Amazon Bedrock, featuring a hybrid mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture for building and deploying reliable multi-agent systems at scale @NVIDIAAI
  • Anthropic announces that all Pro and Max plans receive 2x their usual usage limits through New Year's Eve starting midnight PT @AndrewCurran_
  • Google offers new members 50% off the Google AI Pro annual plan with higher access to Gemini 3 Pro, Nano Banana Pro, Deep Research, and 2TB of Cloud Storage, shareable with up to 5 others @GeminiApp
  • Mistral releases Skills for Vibe CLI with reasoning model support and native terminal themes, allowing developers to bundle and reuse expertise and rules across projects @MistralAI

AI Industry Analysis

  • OpenAI predicts that progress towards AGI in 2026 will depend as much on helping people use AI effectively in healthcare, business, and daily life as on frontier model development, addressing the capability overhang between what models can do and what people actually do with them @OpenAI
  • ServiceNow acquires cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75 billion @TechCrunch
  • Amazon reportedly investing up to $10 billion in OpenAI, who will use that money to buy Amazon's products, raising questions about how to define real revenue with circular deals @TechCrunch
  • The Nordic startup ecosystem is now valued at more than half a trillion dollars, with a newly-launched fund focusing on robotics, AI-native companies, and deep tech founders @TechCrunch
  • Marc Andreessen emphasizes that startups need to scale to have big impact, stating that while innovation happens in startups, they must become big companies to make a significant impact on the world @a16z
  • Survey results show product managers are seeing the most value from AI tools for writing PRDs, creating mockups/prototypes, and improving communication, but AI lags in helping them think through roadmap ideas, meetings, GTM, or user research synthesis @clairevo
  • Context engineering is described as a major challenge in building AI agents, with every decision involving tradeoffs between speed, user interaction, work required, source material completeness, and risk level, highlighting significant value above the LLM layer @Suhail
  • Character.AI was running pretraining on GCP H100-TCPX with 1/4 of bandwidth compared to InfiniBand, with Noam Shazeer inventing a gradient compression algorithm called "Squinch" to maintain state-of-the-art MFU despite poor networking @Suhail

AI Ethics & Society

  • Italy orders Meta to suspend its policy that bans rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp @TechCrunch
  • Research comparing how humans and LLMs form judgments identifies seven fundamental fault lines: grounding (humans anchor in perceptual/social experience vs. LLMs starting from text), parsing (integrated processes vs. mechanical tokenization), experience (episodic memory vs. statistical associations), motivation (emotions/goals vs. no intrinsic preferences), causality (causal models vs. surface correlations), metacognition (uncertainty monitoring vs. inability to suspend judgment), and value (identity/morality vs. probabilistic predictions), warning that fluent language creates a credibility bias leading to "Epistemia" where linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation @dileeplearning
  • Analysis reveals that the average ChatGPT query takes almost exactly as much energy as a Google search in 2008, with both Gemini and OpenAI reporting similar numbers of 0.0003 kWh per median prompt @emollick
  • Trump administration's ban on foreign-made drones starts this week, ending availability of new DJI models @TechCrunch

AI Applications

  • A Redditor fed his MRI into ChatGPT and it appears to have correctly identified the cause of his sciatic leg pain, described as a potential watershed moment for AI in healthcare @gdb
  • Waymo is testing Gemini as an in-car AI assistant in its robotaxis @TechCrunch
  • Tesla Korea owners surpassed 1 million km of cumulative driving distance with FSD (Supervised) in just one month since launch @Tesla_AI
  • Jim Fan describes FSD v14 as perhaps the first AI that passes the Physical Turing Test, where after a long day at work, you couldn't tell if a neural net or a human drove you home @Tesla_AI
  • OpenAI's "Your Year in ChatGPT" ships as a full-screen experience built with the new Apps SDK, demonstrating that developers can build their own similar experiences @gdb

AI Research

  • Poetiq achieves 75% accuracy on ARC-AGI-2 using GPT-5.2 X-High at under $8 per problem, beating the previous state-of-the-art by approximately 15 percentage points and exceeding the human baseline @gdb
  • Ernest Ryu joins OpenAI to help accelerate scientific and mathematical discoveries using ChatGPT @gdb
  • Epoch AI releases research on benchmarking challenges, highlighting issues with evaluating AI providers including token inconsistencies, rate limits, timeouts, and missing parameters that can affect final results @natolambert
  • Yann LeCun and Demis Hassabis debate general intelligence versus universal intelligence, with Hassabis arguing that brains and AI foundation models are approximate Turing Machines capable of learning anything computable given enough time, memory, and data, while acknowledging practical constraints require some degree of specialization @ylecun
  • MIT physicists discover that in pentalayer graphene, electrons can split into fractions of themselves without a magnetic field, a phenomenon that could lead to new advancements in quantum computing and electronics @MIT