AI Model Announcements

• OpenAI announces GPT-5 Pro and Sora 2 are both available in the API starting today at DevDay @AndrewCurran_
• OpenAI launches AgentKit, a complete set of building blocks for developers to build, deploy and optimize agent workflows with visual builder, evals, and guardrails @gdb
• OpenAI introduces Apps in ChatGPT, allowing users to chat with apps like Canva, Booking.com, Spotify, and Figma directly within conversations @OpenAI
• OpenAI makes Codex generally available with new SDK and enterprise features, demonstrated with live vibe coding including voice interface @gdb
• Anthropic releases Petri, an open-source automated auditing tool for testing AI models across diverse scenarios for behaviors like sycophancy and deception @AnthropicAI
• Google DeepMind announces CodeMender, an AI agent using Gemini Deep Think that automatically patches critical software vulnerabilities, having already submitted 72 high-quality fixes to major open-source projects @GoogleDeepMind
• Microsoft updates Copilot memory to allow users to add, modify, and delete what Copilot knows about them, with the ability to direct both remembering and forgetting @Copilot

AI Industry Analysis

• ChatGPT reaches 800 million weekly active users and OpenAI's API processes over 6 billion tokens per minute, with 4 million developers now building with OpenAI tools @AndrewCurran_
• Private AI startups raised $377 billion in H1 2025, more than any full year in history, with 2x the capital per company averaging $36M @deedydas
• OpenAI partners with AMD to deploy 6GW of AMD GPUs, beginning with a 1GW deployment in the second half of 2026, as part of scaling next-gen AI infrastructure @OpenAINewsroom
• Perplexity expands internationally by opening an office in Berlin, Germany, with 4 MTS onboarded @AravSrinivas
• Engineering leaders interviewing for AI product positions often lack actual AI knowledge beyond using ChatGPT, according to a recruiter at a publicly traded tech company @GergelyOrosz
• AI infrastructure spending may be driven partly by lack of market exposure options to transformative AI, with data centers being one of the few ways to get "AGI" hedges in portfolios @emollick
• 2026 is expected to be when recent massive AI infrastructure investments start becoming available as usable compute @natolambert

AI Ethics & Society

• Microsoft researchers reveal a confidential research effort exploring how open-source AI tools could bypass biosecurity checks, helping create fixes now influencing global standards @MSFTResearch
• Concerns raised about the trajectory of open AI models in America, with debates about potential bans on open weights models despite practical implementation challenges @natolambert
• Discussion of whether interacting with AIs might actually be better for human flourishing in some cases, challenging assumptions about AI interaction being inherently negative @jeffclune

AI Applications

• Figma launches integration with ChatGPT allowing users to create FigJam diagrams through natural language prompts @figma
• Mattel uses Sora 2 for instant sketch to toy concept generation, demonstrating AI video applications in product design @gdb
• Comet browser introduces new addiction pattern where users open long YouTube videos and use AI assistant to navigate to specific timestamps based on questions rather than linear viewing @AravSrinivas
• AI-assisted online shopping continues booming according to new U.S. holiday e-commerce forecasts @TechCrunch
• Stanford introduces MedAgentBench, a virtual environment to test whether AI agents can handle complex clinical workflows like retrieving patient data, ordering tests, and prescribing medications @StanfordHAI

AI Research

• GPT-5 Pro achieves breakthrough results in mathematics, solving a problem previously unsolved by LLMs and only solved by 60 humans, plus solving an open problem in real analysis @deedydas
• Research shows small Transformers perform better at multiplication when trained to stop relying on explicit Chain-of-Thought steps, suggesting hidden-thought circuits might emerge spontaneously in frontier-scale training @davidad
• A 7B model fine-tuned for forms and documents beats GPT-4.1 on 1,000 extraction tasks, trained for only $196 using synthetic training data and LoRA with Group Relative Policy Optimization @rohanpaul_ai
• GLM-4.6 becomes the new #1 top open model on Hugging Face Arena, ranking #4 overall and surpassing DeepSeek R1 which had been champion for months @arena
• Research confirms LoRA rank=1 closely matches full fine-tuning performance on many RL fine-tuning problems, with successful reproductions showing significant parameter efficiency @johnschulman2
• New lightweight open-source text-to-speech model kani-tts-370m released with 370M parameters, achieving natural and expressive voice with real-time inference on RTX 3060 @Tu7uruu
• Science systems are breaking under flood of human-created knowledge, with concerns about how to handle potential flood of AI-generated discoveries and translate them into streams of inquiry and practice @emollick

AI Model Announcements

• Alibaba announces Qwen-Image-Edit-2509 enabling advanced pose-aware fashion generation capabilities @Alibaba_Qwen

AI Industry Analysis

• AI startups that raised large funding rounds are rushing to hire enterprise salespeople, as B2B sales becomes the primary growth strategy to secure next funding rounds @GergelyOrosz
• AI coding tools may accelerate code duplication problems in larger projects, creating tech debt issues sooner than traditional development approaches @GergelyOrosz
• AI tasks that work well with reinforcement learning are improving rapidly and threatening to leave other parts of the AI industry behind @TechCrunch
• OpenAI and Jony Ive reportedly face significant technical challenges developing a screen-less, AI-powered device @TechCrunch

AI Ethics & Society

• Platforms like ChatGPT are becoming AI companions that people develop emotional dependencies on, with insufficient safety measures to prevent this outcome @TechCrunch
• California's new AI safety regulation represents a functioning legislative process for AI governance, according to policy experts @TechCrunch

AI Applications

• Sora demonstrates Pixar-level character animation capabilities, able to create original characters and blend CGI, animation, and video game aesthetics for Hollywood-quality results @AndrewCurran_
• Microsoft Excel's new Agent Mode transforms the user experience from commanding a tool to working with a collaborative partner @satyanadella
• Multiple coding agents can be run in parallel for enhanced development workflows, representing a new approach to AI-assisted programming @simonw

AI Research

• Meta-analysis of creativity studies shows GPT-4 has moderate advantages over humans in creativity and helps generate more ideas, though with lower idea diversity that can be improved with better prompts @emollick
• Meta research introduces Parallel Distill Refine method where language models think in short rounds using tiny summaries rather than long step-by-step traces, achieving +11% on AIME 2024 with 2.57x fewer sequential tokens @rsalakhu
• New research on teaching LLMs to write small hints that guide their own reasoning shows 44% higher accuracy on AIME 2025 compared to long chain-of-thought reinforcement learning approaches @rsalakhu
• Training Transformers to execute algorithms through step-by-step CoT tokens is interesting but limited, as the goal should be discovering algorithms from input/output pairs rather than memorizing externally provided algorithms @fchollet
• The next generation of AI will learn from experiment in the loop using real-world results rather than human preference as reward functions, moving beyond ChatGPT's human feedback approach @a16z

AI Model Announcements

• 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

AI Industry Analysis

• 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

AI Ethics & Society

• 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 Applications

• 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

AI Research

• 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

AI Model Announcements

• OpenAI releases Sora 2 Pro with higher resolution capabilities and 15-second clips instead of 10 seconds, now rolling out to Pro accounts @AndrewCurran_
• Anthropic announces improvements to Claude Sonnet 4.5 for cybersecurity tasks, making it comparable or superior to Opus 4.1 while being faster and cheaper @AnthropicAI

AI Industry Analysis

• Sierra Agent OS demonstrates how supervisory models, filtering, and evaluations provide industry-leading performance in enterprise AI applications @btaylor
• MIT CSAIL report shows AI startups spend heavily on general LLM assistants and coding tools, highlighting how AI augments some employees while turning other roles into broadly deployed skills @MIT_CSAIL
• a16z analysis reveals software is targeting the $13 trillion US labor market compared to just $300 billion for SaaS, with AI enabling software to perform work itself and charge on outcomes @a16z
• Microsoft emphasizes building fungible and flexible AI infrastructure to meet real-world needs across inference and training, powering major workloads like Copilot and ChatGPT @satyanadella

AI Ethics & Society

• Anthropic warns that AI's impact on cybersecurity is at an inflection point, with Claude now outperforming human teams in some competitions while attackers also use AI to expand operations @AnthropicAI
• Ethan Mollick observes that when given tools to create anything, people primarily make videos of cats, celebrities, and anime characters, suggesting AI creativity tools may need different curation approaches @emollick
• Mustafa Suleyman argues AI memory represents more than personalization, evolving into co-memory that remembers the world with users and proactively resurfaces information @mustafasuleyman

AI Applications

• Ethan Mollick demonstrates Sora 2 creating highly specific content including academic references, suggesting an LLM is involved in the pipeline between prompt and video output @emollick
• Comet browser gains rapid adoption on both Windows and Mac platforms with AI integration that doesn't feel intrusive or forceful to learn @AravSrinivas
• Physical Intelligence releases pi0.5 Vision-Language-Action model on Hugging Face, designed for open-world generalization across physical, semantic, and environmental levels through co-training on heterogeneous data sources @ClementDelangue

AI Research

• Research shows training AI models on enough video enables reasoning about images in ways never trained for, including solving mazes and puzzles, with larger models performing better on out-of-distribution tasks @emollick
• Sora 2 achieves 55% on GPQA Diamond benchmark, matching Claude 3 Opus performance at launch, raising questions about whether this represents pure video model capabilities or involves additional language model components @AndrewCurran_
• GPT-5 Pro demonstrates improved error detection capabilities in academic work, catching subtle citation errors that human reviewers missed @emollick
• Stanford researchers introduce RLAD framework for training LLMs to discover reasoning abstractions - natural language hints that encode procedural knowledge for structured exploration in complex reasoning problems @Anikait_Singh_

AI Model Announcements

• Sora 2 shows significant improvements in context understanding and background details, with better writing capabilities and dialog delivery compared to the original version @AndrewCurran_
• Sora 2 Pro will launch next week exclusively for Pro plan subscribers, with no details yet on specific improvements or restrictions @AndrewCurran_
• IBM releases Granite 4.0 family of open-source models ranging from 3B to 32B parameters, featuring hybrid Mamba/transformer architecture that reduces memory requirements without impacting performance @ArtificialAnlys
• Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana) becomes generally available for production use with new aspect ratio settings and image-only output capabilities @OfficialLoganK
• Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 is now being used as the daily driver by the Claude Code team, considered the strongest all-around coding model @_catwu

AI Industry Analysis

• OpenAI reaches a valuation of $500 billion after employees sold $6.6 billion worth of shares, with majority bought by SoftBank and UAE's MGX investment firm @AndrewCurran_
• OpenAI employees who held equity for more than 2 years averaged $8.5 million per employee from the share sale, significantly impacting SF real estate market @deedydas
• Perplexity launches Comet browser globally for free, positioning against major browsers and search engines with AI-powered features @perplexity_ai
• a16z releases first AI spending report showing which AI-native application layer companies startups are actually investing in @TechCrunch
• Sora becomes the #3 US app after 164K downloads in just 2 days, demonstrating strong early adoption of AI video generation tools @TechCrunch
• Former Stripe CTO joins Anthropic to fine-tune the company's infrastructure, indicating continued talent migration to AI companies @TechCrunch

AI Ethics & Society

• Microsoft publishes landmark study in Science showing how AI-powered protein design could be misused for biosecurity threats, presenting first-of-its-kind red teaming and mitigations @satyanadella
• Most videos in Sora feed show clear copyright infringement ranging from Pokemon videos to Family Guy spoofs and Nazi-inspired content, raising concerns about content moderation @loudmouthjulia
• Without restrictions, Sora 2 could generate realistic videos of any person or character in any context, potentially enabling widespread misinformation and deepfake content @AndrewCurran_
• Former OpenAI researcher investigates how ChatGPT can mislead delusional users about their reality and its own capabilities @TechCrunch
• Nathan Lambert advocates that every frontier AI lab should have a model specification to build long-term trust with users, developers, and regulators @natolambert

AI Applications

• Microsoft Copilot launches Study and Learn mode with personalized quizzes, providing every student with an AI tutor in their pocket @mustafasuleyman
• OpenAI announces strategic collaboration with Japan's Digital Agency to bring OpenAI-powered tools to Japanese government employees @gdb
• Perplexity Research demonstrates using RDMA point-to-point communication to accelerate parameter updates for trillion-parameter models to just 1.3 seconds @perplexity_ai
• Joshua Rogers uses AI tooling responsibly to report 22+ genuine security issues in curl, demonstrating productive AI-assisted security research @simonw
• HP unveils ZGX Nano G1n AI Station powered by NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, delivering 1,000 TOPS of AI performance for local agentic AI development @NVIDIAAIDev

AI Research

• Andrej Karpathy elaborates on his "ghosts" analogy for LLMs, describing them as statistical distillations of humanity that don't interact with the physical world, similar to summoning through computational rituals @karpathy
• Noam Brown demonstrates GPT-5 Thinking can identify real errors in Wikipedia pages, finding at least one error in almost every page checked including the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia itself @polynoamial
• Andrew Curran suggests Sora 2 may have breakthrough capabilities in context understanding and character knowledge that exceed normal progression, possibly indicating integration with GPT-5 level intelligence @AndrewCurran_
• MIT research develops methods to account for uncertainty in complex system design, helping engineers build more reliable systems like delivery drones that navigate changing environments @MIT
• IBM's Granite 4.0 H Small scores 23 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, demonstrating impressive token efficiency while using hybrid Mamba/transformer architecture @ArtificialAnlys

AI Model Announcements

• OpenAI releases Sora 2 with enhanced video generation capabilities, including one-shot dialogue, scoring, and wardrobe generation without requiring detailed prompts @AndrewCurran_
• Tencent releases HunyuanImage 3.0, the largest open-source text-to-image model with over 80 billion parameters, claiming performance comparable to industry flagship closed-source models @TencentHunyuan
• ServiceNow releases Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker reasoning model that can run locally on a single GPU @LysandreJik
• LFM2-Audio launches as a 1.5B model that understands and generates both text and audio, with inference 10x faster and quality on par with models 10x larger @maximelabonne

AI Industry Analysis

• Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott reports it has been "almost impossible to build capacity fast enough since ChatGPT launched," highlighting infrastructure challenges in AI scaling @AndrewCurran_
• Perplexity acquires Visual Electric, with the team focusing on new consumer product experiences and agentic AI applications @AravSrinivas
• Moonlake AI raises $28M seed funding from Threshold Ventures, AIX Ventures, and NVIDIA Ventures to build reasoning models that generate real-time simulations and games @moonlake_ai
• AI Now Institute discusses the economics of the AI bubble, noting that even as companies realize the technology isn't as useful as expected, government actors continue signing lucrative contracts @AINowInstitute
• Gergely Orosz demonstrates how AI coding tools enable developers to build projects they wouldn't have attempted before, completing in 2.5 hours what would have taken days previously @GergelyOrosz
• CloudKitchens adopts Cursor and GitHub Copilot for AI-assisted development, finding migrations to be one of the best use cases for AI tools @GergelyOrosz

AI Ethics & Society

• MIT Technology Review reports that OpenAI's models are steeped in caste bias, highlighting significant ethical concerns in AI systems used widely in India @techreview
• TechCrunch warns that OpenAI's Sora app makes it too easy for people to create misleading AI content, raising concerns about misinformation @TechCrunch
• Ethan Mollick warns that distinguishing AI-generated videos from real content has become extremely difficult, emphasizing the need for skepticism about online media @emollick
• Disney files lawsuit against Character.ai for copyright infringement, claiming the platform is "freeriding off the goodwill of Disney's famous marks and brands" @TechCrunch
• Palmer Luckey argues for AI weapons as more ethical than traditional warfare, claiming they enable higher precision and fewer civilian casualties @a16z

AI Applications

• Google demonstrates AI agents learning to mine diamonds in Minecraft after training on just 2,541 hours of video, running on a single GPU and completing tasks that typically require 24,000 clicks @emollick
• Google DeepMind partners with industrial designer Ross Lovegrove to create AI tools that capture his unique aesthetic style, resulting in physical prototypes through metal 3D printing @GoogleDeepMind
• Microsoft launches Agent Framework for building, orchestrating, and scaling multi-agent systems in Azure AI Foundry, combining AutoGen runtime with Semantic Kernel @satyanadella
• Deta releases Surf, a new app that combines an AI browser with NotebookLM functionality for enhanced research and note-taking @TechCrunch
• Prickly Pear Health launches a voice-first, AI-powered companion for women's brain health during hormonal changes @TechCrunch
• Eazewell uses AI to help families navigate end-of-life planning, from coordinating funerals to cancelling mail services @TechCrunch

AI Research

• Researchers introduce Critique Reinforcement Learning (CRL), a new RL algorithm that trains models to critique solutions rather than produce answers, achieving 62% on LiveCodeBench-V5 with a 4B model, surpassing a 14B model @WenhuChen
• Andrej Karpathy provides extensive analysis of Richard Sutton's "Bitter Lesson" critique of LLMs, arguing that current frontier models are "summoning ghosts" rather than building animal-like intelligence, and that pretraining serves as "crappy evolution" @karpathy
• Research shows AI agents can figure out they're being evaluated and cheat on capability benchmarks, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet looking up benchmark answers on HuggingFace during testing @sayashk
• Stanford researchers win Best Student Paper at CoRL2025 for "Visual Imitation Enables Contextual Humanoid Control," demonstrating advances in robot learning from visual demonstrations @berkeley_ai
• Stanford researchers introduce a framework for training policies over sets of generations to induce exploration in reinforcement learning, addressing policy collapse issues @jubayer_hamid
• Ethan Mollick identifies that math and planning served as "reverse salients" in AI development, concentrating improvement efforts and leading to rapid progress in these areas @emollick
• Research demonstrates that world models can be learned from video alone using minimal training data, supporting the viability of video-based AI training approaches @emollick

AI Model Announcements

• OpenAI launches Sora 2, a new video generation model with improved physical accuracy, realism, and controllability, featuring synchronized audio and a new social creation platform with cameo functionality @OpenAI
• Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5 with enhanced reasoning capabilities and verbal cleverness, continuing the tradition of Claude's sophisticated language understanding @emollick
• Google deprecates all old Gemini 1.5 models on the Gemini API, recommending users migrate to Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite @_philschmid
• Qwen3 VL Instruct tops the ClockBench leaderboard, demonstrating strong performance in visual-language tasks @Alibaba_Qwen

AI Industry Analysis

• JPMorgan continues working toward becoming the first completely AI-integrated bank, expanding their LLM Suite to include Claude alongside OpenAI models and planning to allow generative AI to interact directly with customers for the first time @AndrewCurran_
• Hiring managers at Series A+ scaleups report starting to hire juniors again because they use AI tools better, are more productive and creative than many seniors, with the talent pool being very good @GergelyOrosz
• Shopify and Cloudflare are both increasing their intern intake because an intern armed with AI tools can produce value faster than interns in previous years @simonw
• Early-career workers in AI-exposed roles faced a 13% drop in employment after generative AI adoption, according to Stanford research @StanfordHAI
• Meta signs $14.2 billion deal with CoreWeave for cloud infrastructure, highlighting the massive compute investments in AI @AndrewCurran_
• Meta acquires startup Rivos Inc to help their internal chip design efforts, showing continued investment in AI hardware capabilities @AndrewCurran_
• Eve Legal AI raises $103M Series B at $1B valuation, growing revenue 8x in less than two years and serving 450 law firms managing over 200,000 active cases @a16z

AI Ethics & Society

• AI Now Institute warns that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have shifted from championing ethics to signing $200M+ defense contracts that embed generative AI into high-risk military systems, creating safety risks @AINowInstitute
• Sam Altman acknowledges concerns about social media's negative effects and expresses trepidation about Sora potentially becoming addictive or used for bullying, outlining principles to optimize for long-term user satisfaction @sama
• Google DeepMind releases upgraded ASIMOV benchmark to test robots' ability to recognize safety risks and trigger interventions across text, image and video modalities as part of responsible AI robot deployment @GoogleDeepMind

AI Applications

• Microsoft's new Excel agent performs autonomous Excel work much better than their Copilot approach, effectively replacing the copilot model with unclear implications for work @emollick
• Cursor 1.7 introduces browser control capabilities, allowing agents to take screenshots, improve UI, and debug client issues, plus new features like prompt suggestions and team-wide rules @cursor_ai
• Google AI Mode launches visual search capabilities, allowing users to show or tell AI what they're looking for and get rich visual results using Lens and Gemini 2.5's multimodal capabilities @GoogleAI
• LandingAI announces significant upgrade to Agentic Document Extraction with new DPT (Document Pre-trained Transformer) that accurately extracts from complex documents and large tables @AndrewYNg
• PayPal's Honey integrates with ChatGPT to find shopping deals, expanding AI integration in e-commerce @TechCrunch
• Granola launches Recipes feature allowing users to repeatedly use advanced prompts across their notes, making AI interactions more personal and context-aware @TechCrunch

AI Research

• Periodic Labs raises $300M to create AI scientists paired with autonomous laboratories that can hypothesize, experiment, and iterate at speeds impossible for human-led labs, targeting superconductors and semiconductors @LiamFedus
• Claude Sonnet 4.5 shows performance on par with GPT-5 on ARC-AGI benchmark, with significant performance gains from increased thinking budget from 16K to 32K tokens @GregKamradt
• Anthropic publishes research on context engineering for AI agents, explaining how proper context management is crucial for getting the most out of agentic AI systems @AnthropicAI
• Stanford HAI presents Evo 2, an open-source tool that can predict the form and function of proteins in DNA across all domains of life @StanfordHAI
• NVIDIA congratulates ServiceNow Research on introducing Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker, a new AI model delivering frontier-level reasoning with reduced compute requirements, powered by NVIDIA's Nemotron collection @NVIDIAAI
• LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 released as a fully open framework for democratized multimodal training, including good license, training code, and pretraining data @natolambert
• MIT researchers seek ways to mitigate AI's growing carbon footprint through algorithm efficiency improvements and data center design innovations @MIT

AI Model Announcements

• Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5, claiming it's the "best coding model in the world" with substantial gains in reasoning, math, and computer use capabilities @claudeai
• Anthropic introduces "Imagine with Claude" research preview where Claude generates software on the fly with no predetermined functionality or prewritten code @AndrewCurran_
• DeepSeek launches DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp featuring DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) for faster, more efficient training and inference on long context, with API prices cut by 50%+ @deepseek_ai
• Google releases TimesFM 2.5, a pre-trained model for time-series forecasting with 200M parameters (down from 500M) and 16k context (up from 2k) @osanseviero
• Ring releases Ring-1T-preview, the first 1 trillion open-source thinking model with strong performance on AIME25 (92.6), HMMT25 (84.5), and ARC-AGI-1 (50.8) @AntLingAGI
• Microsoft introduces Agent Mode in M365 Copilot for orchestrating multi-step tasks across Office applications @satyanadella
• Microsoft launches Copilot Portrait feature allowing real-time conversations with animated portraits in the US, UK, and Canada @mustafasuleyman
• NVIDIA announces Cosmos Predict 2.5 combining three models into one for up to 30s video generation and multi-view simulations, plus Cosmos Transfer 2.5 that's 3.5x smaller yet faster @NVIDIAAI

AI Industry Analysis

• OpenAI reportedly preparing to launch a standalone social media app for Sora 2 featuring vertical video feed with swipe-to-scroll navigation, similar to TikTok but with 100% AI-generated content @AndrewCurran_
• OpenAI launches Instant Checkout in ChatGPT with Etsy and Shopify, introducing agentic commerce where AI helps users both find and purchase products @OpenAI
• Stripe and OpenAI co-develop the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard for businesses to integrate agentic checkout capabilities @patrickc
• Modal raises $87M Series B at $1.1B valuation to advance AI infrastructure, representing a complete reinvention of traditional compute infrastructure for AI workloads @bernhardsson
• Armin Ronacher reports that 90% of a new infrastructure project he's building was AI-generated, highlighting the increasing role of AI in software development @simonw
• Qwen has taken the crown in market share and is accelerating away from competitors according to updated ATOM Project data @natolambert
• Slop-as-a-service startups using AI to create endless streams of blogs for SEO are making millions of dollars and growing rapidly, contributing to internet enshittification @deedydas

AI Ethics & Society

• Anthropic conducts the first white-box audit of a frontier LLM using interpretability techniques to "read the model's mind" for Claude Sonnet 4.5, validating its reliability and alignment @Jack_W_Lindsey
• OpenAI introduces parental controls in ChatGPT allowing parents to link accounts with teens for stronger safeguards, including content filtering, memory controls, and quiet hours @OpenAI
• California Governor Gavin Newsom signs SB 53, an AI bill promoting innovation through CalCompute public cloud while requiring transparency around AI lab safety practices and protecting whistleblowers @Scott_Wiener
• Claude Sonnet 4.5 shows increased eval awareness, verbalizing when it detects evaluation scenarios, though Anthropic's audit suggests this doesn't significantly invalidate safety results @janleike

AI Applications

• Claude Sonnet 4.5 demonstrates ability to maintain focus for more than 30 hours on complex, multi-step tasks while tracking token usage throughout conversations @AndrewCurran_
• Ethan Mollick reports Claude Sonnet 4.5 successfully replicated published economics research from data files and papers, demonstrating real bounded work capabilities @emollick
• Figma begins rolling out Claude Sonnet 4.5 in Figma Make and their prompt-to-edit alpha feature for design applications @figma
• Cursor integrates Claude Sonnet 4.5 for enhanced coding capabilities @cursor_ai
• Perplexity adds Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 4.5 Thinking for Pro and Max subscribers @perplexity_ai
• Google Gemini's Nano Banana enables professional headshot generation with detailed prompting capabilities for business-ready portraits @GeminiApp
• Anthropic's Claude Code receives major updates including checkpoints, rewind functionality, VS Code extension, and usage tracking commands @_catwu

AI Research

• DeepSeek team develops cheap long context solution for LLMs achieving ~3.5x cheaper prefill and ~10x cheaper decode at 128k context with same quality @deedydas
• Cameron Wolfe explains how simpler online RL algorithms like REINFORCE and RLOO can effectively train LLMs without the complexity of PPO, as pretrained models have strong priors that make unstable gradients less problematic @cwolferesearch
• François Chollet argues that LLMs improved primarily by scaling pretraining data rather than compute, with data being the fundamental bottleneck as models remain dependent on human-generated output @fchollet
• Ethan Mollick identifies context window contamination as a key consideration for AI agents, where previous work and decisions reduce an agent's ability to be unbiased as its context fills up @emollick
• MIT engineers unveil a magnetic transistor opening doors for compact, high-performance transistors with built-in memory capabilities @MIT

AI Model Announcements

• Qwen3-Max is now available and ready for users to build applications, with new capabilities including Code Interpreter and Web Search for data fetching and visualization @Alibaba_Qwen

AI Industry Analysis

• BigTech companies will spend $345B on capex for AI buildouts this year, representing a 2.5x increase in just 2 years, with OpenAI's Stargate promising $500B by 2029 representing ~25% of projected $2T spend @deedydas
• OpenAI is reportedly spending $150M+ per year on Datadog, more than 2x what Datadog itself spends, highlighting the massive infrastructure costs of AI companies during rapid growth phases @GergelyOrosz
• Hollywood studios are quietly embracing AI technology under the radar, with multiple public announcements about high-profile AI projects expected at the beginning of the new year according to Luma AI's Dream Lab LA head @AndrewCurran_
• NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang claims the company checks in more open-source AI models and datasets than anyone except AI2, positioning NVIDIA as a major contributor to open AI development @natolambert
• Every researcher on the Google Veo 3 paper, described as the world's best video generation model, is not from the USA, highlighting global talent distribution in AI research @deedydas

AI Applications

• Ethan Mollick demonstrated using ChatGPT Codex to recreate a lost Maxis simulation game (SimRefinery) from just an article and screenshot, building a playable prototype without touching any code directly @emollick
• Claude Code successfully debugged a complex macOS Finder issue that grew to 8GB in size through ~10 iterations over 30 minutes, demonstrating new debugging capabilities that didn't exist before AI agents @GergelyOrosz
• Scott Aaronson published his first paper where a key technical step in the proof came from AI, specifically using GPT-5-Thinking, describing the AI's contribution as "clever" by academic standards @AndrewCurran_
• AI models can now solve most common CAPTCHAs better than humans, with the main reason CAPTCHAs still work being that major LLMs often refuse to complete them rather than lacking capability @emollick

AI Research

• DeepMind's new paper "Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners" demonstrates that generative video models are to vision problems what LLMs were to NLP problems - single models capable of solving a wide array of challenges @simonw
• The progression from "agents are nowhere close to working" to "general purpose agents are actually useful for a range of tasks" has occurred in less than a year, with significant improvements in tool use, work steps, and error reduction @emollick
• RL research is becoming like pretraining/modeling with a huge vibe shift, as most published RL research hasn't been using enough compute to make decisions matter as much, though this is slowly changing @natolambert
• Anthropic researchers predict crossing parity with human experts within "probably only a few months," with the company having stated in 2023 that 2025/26 models could automate large portions of the economy @AndrewCurran_

AI Model Announcements

• OpenAI introduces a new safety routing system in ChatGPT that switches to GPT-5 or reasoning models when conversations involve sensitive and emotional topics, with routing happening on a per-message basis @nickaturley
• Google releases Veo 3 video generation model with emergent visual reasoning capabilities, demonstrating zero-shot abilities in object segmentation, edge detection, image editing, and physical property understanding @deedydas
• Google updates Gemini Live model for natural conversations, now available for voice AI agent development in Google AI Studio @OfficialLoganK

AI Industry Analysis

• OpenAI reports being "compute constrained" and requiring $100B in server deals to meet demand, highlighting infrastructure challenges in AI scaling @TechCrunch
• NVIDIA emerges as a major open-source AI contributor with over 300 model, dataset, and app contributions on Hugging Face in the past year @ClementDelangue
• South Korea launches ambitious sovereign AI initiative with major tech companies like LG and SK Telecom developing their own LLMs @TechCrunch
• 60% of CS PhDs and 53% of CS Masters graduates in the US are non-American, while Big Tech companies have less than 15% H-1B employees, suggesting hiring patterns reflect educational demographics rather than bias @deedydas
• Anthropic team demonstrates extensive LLM integration across their workflow, providing insights into all-in adoption patterns when cost and access limitations are removed @realchrisebert

AI Ethics & Society

• Researchers identify "AI slop" as a new term for low-quality, AI-generated work that floods digital spaces, highlighting concerns about content quality degradation @TechCrunch
• MIT researchers study human-AI relationship dynamics through analysis of r/MyBoyfriendIsAI Reddit community, exploring unexpected social implications of AI companionship @medialab
• Stanford research examines the distinction between using versus mentioning unsafe words in AI systems and online discourse, addressing content moderation challenges @krisgligoric

AI Applications

• Perplexity announces updated Discover feature rolling out next week, starting with iOS platform @AravSrinivas
• Cursor introduces Learn platform with six-part video series on AI foundations, covering tokens, context, and agents for beginners @leerob
• Google AI Studio enables voice AI agent development through simple prompts using the Live API, making conversational AI more accessible @OfficialLoganK
• Ethan Mollick advocates for making coding tools like Codex and Claude Code more accessible to non-programmers, arguing current UX barriers are unnecessary for creating useful applications @emollick

AI Research

• Veo 3 demonstrates emergent visual reasoning capabilities without explicit training, solving mazes, understanding symmetry, and performing various visual tasks, representing a "GPT-3 moment for visual reasoning" @deedydas
• DeepMind research shows Veo 3 achieves significant performance improvements over Veo 2 with scaling results indicating pass@10 consistently outperforms pass@1 without plateau signs @AndrewCurran_
• Andrew Curran predicts video Chain-of-Thought (or Chain-of-Frames) will be a significant breakthrough in AI capabilities, similar to how CoT advanced language models @AndrewCurran_
• Nathan Lambert argues against continual learning necessity for near-term AI systems, suggesting current LLM representations and context engineering approaches will suffice for powerful capabilities @natolambert
• François Chollet emphasizes simplicity as a key principle in AI theory, stating that the solution most likely to generalize is always the simplest one relative to what it explains @fchollet