Big week this week with the release of GPT-5.5, DeepSeek v4, and ChatGPT Images 2.0. There’s also a great video of a robot playing table tennis because why not?!

In Web 4.0 news, OpenAI has started testing cost-per-click ads and Anthropic is connecting Claude to lots more tools.

In Ethics news, there’s more commentary on Anthropic’s Mythos model, and the Pentagon is looking to pivot to AI-powered warfare.

A few great Long Reads to check out too - Nilay Patel writes about ‘Software Brain’ on The Verge which explores why some people are bullish on AI whilst others hate it. There’s also a great video from Gary Stevenson on whether AI will drive wages up or down.

OpenAI says its new GPT-5.5 model is more efficient and better at coding

The big release of the week was from OpenAI who made GPT-5.5 available to the world, hot off the back of Anthropic releasing Opus 4.7 last week.

The promotional video definitely positions GPT-5.5 around tool use and automation and shows off how the Codex app is a much more capable interface than the usual way of interacting with ChatGPT. I suspect we’re seeing a move towards the ChatGPT interface just being for ‘chatting’ whereas the Codex app is starting to pivot away from just being a ‘coding’ app to more of a general purpose ‘work’ app for getting things done.

As Ethan Mollick says in his review, it’s difficult to articulate how GPT-5.5 improves on previous models as AI still has a jagged frontier. But it does intuitively feel better, faster, and more efficient. It’s definitely progress, but it’s hard to articulate on what exactly.

OpenAI | The Verge | Ethan Mollick | Simon Willison

DeepSeek previews new AI model that ‘closes the gap’ with frontier models

It’s been just over 15 months since DeepSeek released their v3.2 and R1 models which temporarily sent tech stocks in the US spiralling. This week the released both DeepSeek V4 Flash and V4 Pro which are mixture-of-experts models with context windows of 1 million tokens each.

DeepSeek says they have almost “closed the gap” with current leading models, but both their models are text only. However, the models are much more affordable than any other frontier model available today and are available as open-weights models unlike any of their peers.

HuggingFace | TechCrunch | Simon Willison

OpenAI’s updated image generator can now pull information from the web

On Tuesday, OpenAI started rolling out its second generation image generating model, citing ‘new thinking capabilities’, higher resolution images and more consistency. It wouldn’t surprise me if we’re about to see (hear!) a new voice generating model too, as I’m sure that’s what they used for the narration of this video.

ChatGPT Images 2.0 certainly looks very impressive, but we haven’t seen the same Ghibli-style hype we saw with the first version a year ago. To put it to the test I gave it the last 6 weeks of newsletters I’ve written and a couple of the more recent longer reads I’ve published and it came up with the hero image for this week’s newsletter. You can judge for yourselves!

Simon Willison had a fun test of the new model too, getting it to generate Where’s Wally/Waldo style images, which I think he quickly regretted!

OpenAI | The Verge | Simon Willison

AI-powered robot beats elite table tennis players

Sony AI in Zurich have developed a table tennis playing robot, called Ace, that was able to win three out of five matches against elite players, but lost the two it played against professional players. This might be the Garry Kasparov moment for robotics.

Back in 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue, a specialised chess playing supercomputer, became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion. Similarly, Ace is a specialised table tennis playing robot - it uses multiple camera, specific ball-tracking and, isn’t bi-pedal, using an eight-jointed arm on a movable base.

It even pulled off one rapid backspin shot that a professional had thought impossible:

When Ace played an unusual shot, intercepting the ball early and imparting backspin, the former Olympic table tennis player Kinjiro Nakamura, said it had not thought it possible, but now believed that humans could learn the shot.

So, we’re still a waySteam way off a general humanoid robot being able to reliably beat table tennis professionals. It took about 20 years to get from Deep Blue to Alpha Zero, which was more of a general purpose game-learning system. I wonder how long it will take us to get to a general purpose game-playing humanoid robot?

The Guardian | Nature

Web 4.0

• OpenAI turns on cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT

• Claude is connecting directly to your personal apps like Spotify, Uber Eats, and TurboTax

• OpenAI now lets teams make custom bots that can do work on their own

AI Ethics News

• The Guardian view on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos: when AI finds every flaw, who controls the internet?

• Some Unknown Group Is Reportedly Using Claude Mythos Without Permission

• Pentagon asks for $54bn in pivot towards AI-powered war

• AI Companies Think Destroying the Planet Is an Acceptable Trade-Off for Unlimited Profits

• Now Meta will track what employees do on their computers to train its AI agents

• Officials hugely underestimated impact of AI datacentres on UK carbon emissions

• AI failure could trigger the next financial crisis, warns Elizabeth Warren

• Microsoft and Meta announce large staff reductions as they spend big on AI

• Newspaper Company Allegedly Puts Humans’ Bylines on AI Articles Unless Contractually Prevented from Doing So

Long Reads

• The Verge - Beware Software Brain

• Garys Economics - Will AI drive wages down… or up?

• The Ezra Klein Show - Stewart Brand on LSD, AI Black Boxes and the Beauty of Care

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

Big week this week with the release of Claude Opus 4.7, which has been slept on by the mainstream media, the release of a genuinely creative AI model from a small Australian startup, Springboards and signs that Design might be the next area to be widely disrupted by AI. There was also a great TED talk from Peter Steinberger who shares his OpenClaw story.

Enjoy!

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.7 to Remind Everyone How Great Mythos Is

On Thursday Anthropic released the latest version of their most capable Opus model, bumping it up to version 4.7. For some reason this wasn’t that widely reported on, but I think this is a bigger deal than most people think.

Firstly, Anthropic don’t release their Opus models very often. For example, the Opus models jumped directly from v3 to v4 whilst Sonnet (their mid-tier model) had v3.5 and v3.7 between major model releases.

Secondly, Opus has never before been on a higher version number than Sonnet. Ever. Anthropic have always been very deliberate and careful with their release strategy to roll out Sonnet first, and then if everything goes well from a safety perspective to then release the Opus model.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, Opus 4.7 is a huge leap in performance that we don’t usually see with point releases, especially in just 2 months (Opus 4.6 was released in February). As you can see below, on agentic coding tasks, Opus 4.7 is a clear 10-15 percentage points more capable which is huge!

For me, all of this points towards Opus 4.7 being more like a preview of Opus 5, rather than just a point release improvement over Opus 4.6. This is a distilled version of Anthropic’s new Mythos model dressed up as Opus. Anthropic hint at this in their release, but don’t go as far as fully confirming it:

We stated that we would keep Claude Mythos Preview’s release limited and test new cyber safeguards on less capable models first. Opus 4.7 is the first such model: its cyber capabilities are not as advanced as those of Mythos Preview (indeed, during its training we experimented with efforts to differentially reduce these capabilities).

I’ve been putting Opus 4.7 through its paces with various coding and other general tasks over the weekend, and I have to say I’m very impressed. It’s not just coding tasks it’s materially better at, it’s also more thoughtful, considered, reliable, and thorough in all the tasks I’ve thrown at it.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more coverage and commentary of Opus 4.7 next week because it’s just too good to ignore.

Anthropic | Gizmodo

Flint by Springboards

I’ve been following Springboards for a couple of years now - they’re a great Australian start-up that are focused on marketing and creative work and building AI tools that enhance creativity instead of replacing it.

This week they released their first AI model, Flint, which has been trained specifically for inspiration and creativity. It’s designed to tackle a problem with our current AI models that not many people are aware of - they ‘collapse’ to the average, are brilliantly mediocre, and cater for the masses. This is all like poison for a creative process and Springboards want to address this head on with Flint.

The demo above is really worth a watch - it clearly shows how leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI keep giving repeating and predictable answers whereas Flint injects much more variation and creativity. Flint is in alpha preview now, and focused on classic marketing use cases, but I think has a lot of potential for broader creative tasks and workflows in the future. Flint will be great for anything that requires a spark of creativity. One to keep an eye on!

Springboards

Anthropic Launches Claude Design

Releasing their most capable model just wasn’t enough for Anthropic this week, so they decided to release a whole new capability in Claude Design. This is essentially a frontend UI design tool, but can be applied to lots of other things too like graphics and presentation slides.

This has the potential to be very disruptive and Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s CPO, even had to leave Figma’s board of directors as part of releasing this new capability. Following the release, Figma’s stock price also fell by 7%.

It’s an interesting time in the design space right now with Claude Design, and the launch of Google’s Stitch a few weeks ago. I think this is the next area to see major disruption after the huge amount of disruption we’ve been seeing in the coding space over the last 6 months. Because AI models are now so good at code, and frontend design (and other types of design) can be driven by code, they’re now very quickly becoming really good at design too.

As I’ve said before, software ate the world and now AI is eating software, taking the world with it.

Anthropic | TechCrunch | Gizmodo

How I created OpenClaw

OpenClaw has had a lot of hype this year, and deservedly so - it’s been the fastest growing open source project of all time and got a huge amount of love not just from the developer community but lots of press coverage too.

So it’s great to see the personal story behind the code in this TED talk from Peter Steinberger, who has recently joined OpenAI. He’s been on a wild journey over the last 6 months and regardless of what you think of OpenClaw it has been incredibly disruptive and has a huge impact on they types of tools AI companies are developing, and how they’re developing them.

TED

Web 4.0

• AI traffic to US retailers rose 393% in Q1, and it’s boosting their revenue too

• Google adds Nano Banana-powered image generation to Gemini’s Personal Intelligence

AI Ethics News

• ChatGPT’s latest stylistic quirk is sinister, infuriating – and absolutely everywhere

• Anthropic co-founder confirms the company briefed the Trump administration on Mythos

• Read OpenAI’s latest internal memo about beating the competition — including Anthropic

• At the HumanX conference, everyone was talking about Claude

• Zelenskyy Says Drones Are the Future of War After Claiming Robot Unit Captured Russian Troops

Long Reads

• Stratechery - Mythos, Muse, and the Opportunity Cost of Compute

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

Three big news stories this week - Anthropic announced that they won’t release their newest model, Mythos, as it poses a major cybersecurity risk, Meta get back in the AI game, and Unitree announce pre-orders for their R1 robot outside of China for under $5k.

In Ethics News, a 20-year-old was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house, OpenAI shared their vision for the AI economy, and the US summoned bank bosses to discuss cyber risks posed by Anthropic’s latest AI model.

Good long reads from Helen Toner on AGI and the New Yorker on Sam Altman worth checking out too.

Anthropic debuts preview of powerful new AI model Mythos in new cybersecurity initiative

The frontier AI companies have been hinting at this for a while now - they’re going to get to the point where they train a model that has capabilities they’re hesitant to release to the general public. That moment has now come and the reason is cybersecurity.

This week Anthropic announced a new model, Mythos, that is so capable at coding that it poses serious cybersecurity risks. Instead of releasing it, they are partnering with some of the biggest technology companies in the world to test it and use it to identify security gaps in their own platforms before they decide whether to release Mythos more broadly. They’re effectively giving all the large technology platforms a ‘head start’.

To try and put this in context, Mythos found a bug that had gone undiscovered for 27 years. It’s also helped one cybersecurity professional discover more bugs in 2 weeks than they have throughout their entire career.

There is some scepticism that all of this is essentially ‘marketing cover’ to put more advanced models behind ever larger enterprise contracts but I don’t buy that argument. Although, I am a big cynical that complete co-incidence OpenAI also announced a few days later that they’re about release a new cybersecurity product.

What I think this shows is that we’re starting to reach a tipping point where models are so advanced that just releasing them isn’t a good idea. We’re now entering a period where frontier AI companies are going to have to think more carefully about how and when they release their most capable models.

Anthropic | TechCrunch | Axios

Meta debuts the Muse Spark model in a ‘ground-up overhaul’ of its AI

A month ago I wrote about Meta reportedly delaying the release of its latest model, but this week they did actually release it under the name Muse Spark. This is obviously Meta playing catch-up, so don’t expect it to introduce any new groundbreaking capabilities.

Simon Willison took it for a spin and noted that it has some interesting tools, and the release helped the Meta AI app climb to No. 5 on the App Store.

I’d file this as a stepping-stone release while Meta plays catch-up and they’ve promised that bigger more advanced models are to come and that they’re going to get back into the open-weights model game, which can only be a good thing.

Meta | TechCrunch | Simon Willison

Here’s The Most Affordable Humanoid Robot You Can Buy Now

Back in July last year, I shared that Chinese robotics company Unitree was releasing their R1 humanoid robot for less than $6k. They’ve just opened pre-orders for this outside of China for less than $5k.

It’s a bit mind-blowing to think that you could own a humanoid robot for less than $5k. It’s still a novelty at this point, and humanoid robots still can’t reliably complete your average day-to-day household chores but it’s looking increasingly likely that this is a solvable software problem, not a hardware problem now.

This means that it’s likely in the not too-distant future that people will be able to buy a genuinely helpful humanoid robot for less than $5k at today’s prices. If/when this takes off it’s going to have a massive impact on the world.

Forbes | Unitree

Web 4.0

• Can AI responses be influenced? The SEO industry is trying

• Microsoft starts removing Copilot buttons from Windows 11 apps

AI Ethics News

• 20-year-old man arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house

• OpenAI’s vision for the AI economy: public wealth funds, robot taxes, and a four-day workweek

• AI products are reaching further into our lives. Does it matter who controls the companies behind them?

• Gemini is making it faster for distressed users to reach mental health resources

• OpenAI shelves Stargate UK in blow to Britain’s AI ambitions

• ‘It has your name on it, but I don’t think it’s you’: how AI is impersonating musicians on Spotify

• US summoned bank bosses to discuss cyber risks posed by Anthropic’s latest AI model

• The vibes are off at OpenAI

Long Reads

• Helen Toner - The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point

• The New Yorker - Sam Altman May Control Our Future - Can He Be Trusted?

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

For your entertainment and delight this week we have three news stories that shine a light on a new battleground I think we have coming - speed and efficiency. First we have Google’s launch of Gemma 4, Microsoft launched three new frontier models, and then there is some great research from Anthropic on the ‘emotions’ of AI models.

In Web 4.0 news there’s a nice little update on ChatGPT Ads and a report on the stark reality digital news publishers are facing with the rise of AI platforms.

In Long Reads there’s a really good article from Stratechery celebrating 50 years of Apple which also has a great argument for why Apple is wining the AI war by sitting it out. Great argument, and a great read.

Google announces Gemma 4 open AI models

We’re now on the 4th generation of Google’s ‘open-weight’ Gemma models and the biggest change this time around is that they’re now released under a proper Apache 2.0 licence, the most common open-source licence there is. This is great for developers and businesses.

Gemma 4 is also a big update to the capabilities of this family of models, over the previous version that is 12 months old now. The models were built using all the same research and technology that were used to build the third generation Gemini models that have been hugely successful over the last 6 months.

Gemma 4 comes in the usual variants allowing them to be run locally, which dramatically reduces costs and increases speed. There are versions that can run on laptops and versions that can run on mobile devices.

YouTube | Google | Ars Technica

Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models

Three big frontier AI models were released by Microsoft’s AI team this week - one for transcription, one for voice generation, and one for image generation.

A lot of Microsoft’s announcement focuses on speed and efficiency which I think will be an interesting battleground going forwards. Over the next couple of years I think we’re going to see a lot of progress here, especially on speed and we’ll look back at today’s AI like we view dial-up modem from the 90s.

TechCrunch | Microsoft

Anthropic Says That Claude Contains Its Own Kind of Emotions

This is a super interesting video. Put aside the idea of emotions for one second and what it’s actually about is identifying parts of the model that influence behaviour. Turn up/down certain parts and it’s more/less likely to cheat at a test.

The video concludes that we need to think of AI models as characters in their own story. They don’t have emotions, but there are aspects of its character that can influence it, just like our emotions influence us.

This could lead to better model tuning in the future for specific tasks and generally helping align models more successfully. Great work!

YouTube | Wired

Web 4.0

• ChatGPT ads favor clarity over creativity, new data shows

• Future share price plummets after warning Google traffic loss has worsened

• As more Americans adopt AI tools, fewer say they can trust the results

AI Ethics News

• AI companies are building huge natural gas plants to power data centers. What could go wrong?

• OpenAI buys tech talkshow TBPN in push to shape AI narrative

• Anthropic ramps up its political activities with a new PAC

• If OpenAI is to float on the stock market this year, it needs to start turning a profit

• LLMs Will Protect Each Other if Threatened, Study Finds

Long Reads

• One Useful Thing - Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces

• Stratechery - Apple’s 50 Years of Integration

• Business Insider - OpenAI needs to make money. Meet Fidji Simo, the ‘founder-mode’ executive charged with making it happen.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

It was a quieter week this week in the mainstream AI news, but Anthropic quietly went about shipping a huge volume of developer-facing features and news continued to seep out about OpenAI’s pivot. Oh, and Figure 03 turned up at the White House.

In Ethics news, David Sacks has departed as the White House’s AI Czar, there’s more follow up to Anthropic’s battle with the Pentagon, and Wikipedia cracks down on the use of AI in article writing.

Good interview with Sundar Pichai in Long Reads too.

Claude can now control your Mac

Anthropic have had one helluva week, shipping Channels, Dispatch, Computer Use, Auto Mode, and iMessage support in the last 7 days. Much of this is developer-facing, but I think allowing your AI Assistant to control your computer from your phone is interesting more broadly.

Much of this is inspired by the approach OpenClaw took, primarily to give it access to more of the things that you usually do on your computer, including all your data, as well as a dedicated compute environment.

Anthropic’s approach is a bit different, but it also presupposes that you have a computer to connect to in the first place. Many consumers don’t have a personal computer at home and do everything they need to do on their phone, tablet, or work computer, and because of this I don’t think this will be a big hit with consumers, who would want something much more native and integrated into their mobile device.

Interesting ideas though!

Anthropic | Simon Willison | X

OpenAI Pivots

It’s no secret to anyone paying attention that OpenAI is going through a bit of an identity crisis at the moment. Or if it is supposed to be a secret, then it’s not being kept very well!

It’s been widely reported that OpenAI are pivoting to focus less on consumers and more on Enterprise. I think this comes from two places - one a recognition of the success that Anthropic has been having in this space, and two a desperate need to grow revenues faster. Part of this pivot is to drop all their ‘side quests’ which is why they just gave up on Sora (despite having recently inked a $1bn deal with Disney), erotic mode (🤮) and pulling back from Instant Checkout which they had been testing in the US for the last 6 months.

It’s the second reason that I think is the big driver here, but also the most confusing. Testing a paid ads model in ChatGPT is obviously a revenue driver, but so was Instant Checkout (they we taking a 2-4% cut of every sale) which is why I’m not sure why they’re pulling back from it.

It makes sense for OpenAI to stop all the ‘side quests’ they were on - it was getting a little ridiculous how many things they were trying to do at once and was starting to feel a bit like a ‘shotgun strategy’.

Focus is good. Revenue is good. But it still doesn’t feel (at least from the outside) that they’ve quite settled on what their strategy should be going forwards.

Reuters | TechCrunch | The Verge | TechCrunch

Melania Trump and AI powered robot named ‘Figure 03’ open White House summit

Yep…. this happened. Memes followed.

The Guardian | YouTube

AI Ethics News

• David Sacks is done as AI czar - here’s what he’s doing instead

• AI boom risks widening wealth divide, says BlackRock’s Larry Fink

• Elizabeth Warren calls Pentagon’s decision to bar Anthropic ‘retaliation’

• Anthropic wins injunction against Trump administration over Defense Department saga

• Sam Altman-backed fusion startup Helion in talks to sell power to OpenAI

• Wikipedia cracks down on the use of AI in article writing

• Anthropic left details of an unreleased model, an upcoming exclusive CEO event, in a public database

Long Reads

• Fast Company - Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s plan to make Gemini the only AI that matters

• Artificial Ignorance - The Bots Are Reading Along

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

The big event of the week was Nvidia’s annual GTC conference that didn’t go by without raising a fair amount of controversy with the gaming community by using generative AI to make video games more photorealistic.

The big release of the week was, ironically, the mini and nano version of GPT-5.4 from OpenAI which is the first time we’ve seen smaller models from then since the original launch of GPT-5 last summer.

The big video of the week was Bernie speaking with Claude about AI and user privacy. It’s worth a watch as I think Claude comes across really well, but unsurprisingly it is telling Bernie all the things he’s likely to agree with!

The big Web 4.0 news is that Google is now using AI to replace headlines in search. It is not ok to change a publications headlines just to suite your needs, especially when doing so surreptitiously and without any notice or permission.

Nvidia’s DLSS 5 uses generative AI to boost photorealism in video games

This week, Nvidia had its annual GTC conference with the usual gang-buster 2 hour+ keynote from Jensen Huang. It covered everything from AI to gaming, to robotics, to Olaf from Frozen 🥶.

The most controversial announcement was gaming related where Nvidia introduced DLSS 5 which uses generative AI to make characters much more photorealistic. Needless to say that this didn’t go down well with gamers or developers and resulted in Jensen Huang just telling everyone that “they’re wrong”.

Many gamers view games as a form of art and by manipulating the graphics you’re changing the style and intent of the game designer. Yes, Nvidia say that developers and gamers are in control at all times, but to me this is another classic example of a generative AI solution in search of a problem.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should and given that many major game developers were blindsided by this announcement I see no evidence of Nvidia developing this feature in consultation with any developers or gamers.

I had started to hope that we were though the initial phase of generative AI product development where it’s just bolted onto lots (and lots!) of existing products and starting to see products that have been developed with generative AI from the ground-up. This is not one of those unfortunately.

Nvidia | YouTube | TechCrunch | Wired

OpenAI release GPT-5.4 mini and nano

We haven’t seen mini and nano model varieties from OpenAI since the initial launch of GPT-5 last summer and these update those, bringing more intelligence and the knowledge cut off up from May 2024 to August 2025.

We don’t really talk about the knowledge cutoff of models much anymore now they’re so good for searching and pulling back up-to-date information to inform their answers, but I think its still important, especially for developers who predominantly use these models ‘out-of-the-box’ and don’t necessarily give them access to live search.

Having said that, these new models are 3-4x more expensive to use that their GPT-5 counterparts, which is quite the price hike for developers. The models are definitely better, but whether they’re worth that price increase remains to be seen.

OpenAI | Simon Willison

Bernie speaks to Claude

Firstly, hats off to Bernie for leaning into AI, being open-minded but critical, and paying attention to what’s happening. He has a bit to learn on how AI works as there is sycophancy at play here and Claude is telling him what he wants to hear. But, he is making a much broader, more important point about user data and privacy.

Being European, these questions seem woefully out of date. We’ve had GDPR for 8 years now specifically to try and address all of these concerns. Whilst I wouldn’t point to GDPR as a great success story in its implementation at least the fundamental idea was right - to give consumers more transparency and control over their data. However, it’s also painfully clear that GDPR is not fit-for-purpose with AI platforms and needs a re-think. I’d say that GDPR is broadly being ignored when it comes to AI platforms and that’s not a good state of affairs for anyone.

I also think this is actually quite a good ad for Claude - it comes across really well and even makes Bernie laugh with it’s answer to why consumer information is being collected - it’s simple answer is ‘Money’.

YouTube | Gizmodo

Web 4.0

• Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines

• Gemini task automation is slow, clunky, and super impressive

• OpenAI courts private equity to join enterprise AI venture, sources say

• Amazon brings Alexa+ to the UK

• OpenAI is planning a desktop ‘superapp’

AI Ethics News

• Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for allegedly ‘memorizing’ its content with ChatGPT

• A rogue AI led to a serious security incident at Meta

• Tory chief whip reposts AI video created by far-right figure who was jailed for hate crimes

• Trump takes another shot at dismantling state AI regulation

• Nvidia CEO Wants Tech Execs to Stop Laying Off Workers and Scaring People

• Nvidia’s version of OpenClaw could solve its biggest problem: security

• Google scraps AI search feature that crowdsourced amateur medical advice

• Trump’s Embrace of AI Is Blowing Up the Whole Reason He Wanted Tariffs in the First Place

Long Reads

• Stratechery - Agents Over Bubbles

• Shubham Bose - The 49MB Web Page

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

A bit of a quieter week this one. Meta has reportedly delayed the rollout of its new AI model, despite a $1bn hiring spree last summer. They also acquired Moltbook 🤷‍♂️.

Apple celebrated its 50th birthday, which I couldn’t help but share and Figure AI showed off their Helix robot tidying an already incredibly tidy living room.

Good long read from Ethan Mollick this week too.

Meta Delays Rollout of New AI Model After Performance Concerns

Nearly 12 months ago, Meta released the 4th generation of their Llama series of open weight models that up until then had been the poster child of the open weight community. That release went very badly for them and they were caught gaming AI benchmarks.

This resulted in a complete pivot from Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg, who acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI, poached their founder to lead their new Superintelligence Lab, and spent a reported $1bn on hiring as much AI talent as they could.

This pivot hasn’t resulted in any new model releases yet, and 12 months is a long time in AI. So even if you don't believe the rumours that Meta has delayed the rollout of its new models because of performance concerns, the fact that there have been no new models released since Llama 4 is telling. Alongside this, Meta are reportedly planning sweeping layoffs to offset their AI investments, so things aren’t looking great for them right now.

It’s a real shame as the Llama family of models were great and really led the field for the first couple of years of the current AI boom. If Meta had stuck to that strategy I think both they and the AI community would have been better for it.

New York Times | The Guardian | Gizmodo

Meta acquired Moltbook

Ok, buddy…

Very weird. Very very weird for Meta to acquire this… 🤷‍♂️

TechCrunch

Apple celebrates 50 years

Technically, not AI related but I couldn’t let Apple celebrate 50 years without a mention, especially as I wrote about how I Miss Steve Jobs this time last year.

A great post to celebrate from Tim Cook, quoting my favourite ad of all time.

Congrats Apple - here’s to the crazy ones!

Apple

Helix 02 Tidies the Living Room

Always good to see the progress Figure AI are making with their humanoid robots. I swear they’re deliberately trying to make the robot seem more human with how it carries the towel… also that is the cleanest living room I’ve seen in a while - not sure it really needed tidying TBH!

YouTube

Web 4.0

Skills are awesome. Originally developed by Anthropic it’s great to see these being widely adopted by OpenAI, just like MCP before it. They’re essentially re-usable instructions you can give to you AI assistant that it can automatically use without you having to prompt it specifically. They’re widely used in AI coding and now just starting to enter the enterprise. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more on them this year.

• OpenAI Scales Back Shopping Plans for ChatGPT

• Anthropic’s Claude AI can respond with charts, diagrams, and other visuals now

• Google’s Gemini AI is getting a bigger role across Docs, Sheets, and Slides

• Gemini’s task automation is here and it’s wild

• OpenAI’s Sora video generator is reportedly coming to ChatGPT

AI Ethics News

• OpenAI and Google employees rush to Anthropic’s defense in DOD lawsuit

• Microsoft backs AI firm Anthropic in legal battle against Pentagon

• Sam Altman Says Intelligence Will Be a Utility, and He’s Just the Man to Collect the Bills

• Revealed: UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’

• AI chatbots helped ‘teens’ plan shootings, bombings, and political violence, study shows

Long Reads

• One Useful Thing - The Shape of the Thing

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

This week has seen the continued fallout of Anthropic vs. ‘DoW’ and a big new model release from OpenAI - GPT-5.4. Both are a big deal - the Anthropic situation because of the future direction it could point to and GPT-5.4 because it feels like OpenAI’s GPT-5 generation models have finally hit their stride.

In Web 4.0 there’s a nice little update on how ChatGPT searches, and some interesting Ethics news for you all too.

Enjoy!

Fallout of Anthropic vs. ‘DoW’ continues

As predicted last week, the impact of Anthropic’s falling out with the Pentagon has spilled over into this week.

Firstly, Sam Altman has admitted that their rushed deal with the Pentagon looked ‘sloppy’ and OpenAI have had to admit that they can’t control the Pentagon’s use of AI and ultimately had to cave in on AI-powered surveillance. This has already led to one high profile resignation from OpenAI, their head of robotics Caitlin Kalinowski quit yesterday.

Unsurprisingly, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called OpenAI’s messaging around their military deal ‘straight up lies’ and the Pentagon officially labeled them a supply-chain risk, which Anthropic has said they will challenge in court. There’s also been a strong consumer reaction to all of this with ChatGPT uninstalls surging by 295% and Claude’s app installs surging.

If you’re interested about learning more or hearing more in-depth analysis and opinions I recommend the podcasts below:

OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 with Pro and Thinking versions

On Thursday OpenAI released their latest model, GPT-5.4 and I have to say that it is a very good model.

This feels like the GPT-5 model we’ve been waiting for and reminds me of how Apple’s operating system versions tend to work - there’s a lot of excitement about the new features for the major model releases, but it’s not until you get to the .3 or .4 releases 6 months later that you really start to see what they’re capable of.

And I think the same is true here. GPT-5.4 feels really good. The auto-switching between thinking modes is really dialled in, it’s fast when it needs to be, and takes its time when it needs to. It’s less error prone and the character of the model feels much nicer - no more of the sycophancy.

OpenAI touts better benchmark scores, lower token usage, and GPT-5.4 is a hybrid model that includes all the coding advancements they’re been building with the codex versions of the previous models. They’re also positioning it as the best model for professional work with improved tool and skill usage and a better foundational model for building agentic workflows.

I’m impressed.

TechCrunch | OpenAI

Web 4.0

How AI platforms search is one of the most important areas for marketers to understand as more and more people start using them in their day-to-day digital lives. That’s why whenever one of the major platforms makes some changes I pay attention.

Web Search on AI platforms is VERY different from how traditional search works. For example, consumers usually only perform 1-2 searches to answer their question and usually take the 5th result on average. AI platforms usually run 2-4 search queries in parallel and on average use the 12th result, which wouldn’t even appear on the first results page of a traditional search.

The reasons for these differences aren’t fully researched and understood yet, but I believe that AI platforms are very good at searching and finding results for the intent behind the prompt they’ve been given, whereas traditional search is driven more by the keywords in the search query. So AI platforms prioritise intent and relevance, whereas traditional search prioritises keywords and traffic volumes. Lots more to learn!

• Anthropic upgrades Claude’s memory to attract AI switchers

• News Corp is essentially an AI ‘input company’, chief executive says, after US$150m deal with Meta

• Google Search rolls out Gemini’s Canvas in AI Mode to all US users

• MoneySuperMarket launches UK ChatGPT app

AI Ethics News

• No one has a good plan for how AI companies should work with the government

• I’m on the Meta Oversight Board. We need AI protections now

• Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic, but his explanation raises more questions than it answers

• Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

This week in AI has been dominated with the very messy, very public fallout between Anthropic and the US Government, which I’ve tried to outline and simplify for you all below. It’s inevitable that it will spill into next week, especially with OpenAI wading in and causing more confusion by claiming they’ve now done a deal with the ‘Department of War’ on the same terms Anthropic was sticking to, which the US government denies. We also had the release of Nano Banana 2 from Google and some impressive robotics Kung Fu that’s a fun watch.

In Web 4.0 news, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT now has 900m weekly users and in Ethics news, a thought experiment on Substack send the Stock Market Spiralling.

There are a few good long reads to check out this week too - The trap Anthropic built for itself (which relates to Anthropic vs. the US Government) and The billion-dollar infrastructure deals powering the AI boom.

Anthropic vs. the ‘Department of War’

Back in June 2024 Anthropic were the first frontier AI company to deploy their models in the US government’s classified network. Since then, Anthropic have always maintained two red lines as it related to the use of its technology for military operations: it will not allow its models to be used for mass domestic surveillance or to develop fully autonomous weapons that would operate without human involvement.

On Tuesday Pete Hegseth Demanded Anthropic Drop their AI Safety Guardrails, which was the culmination of an ongoing standoff between the company and the US Government. On Thursday Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s new terms. In a public statement Amodei said that whilst fully autonomous weapons may eventually “prove critical for our national defense,” that “today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.”

On Friday, this all lead to employees at both Google and OpenAI supporting Anthropic’s stance in an open letter with over 700 signatures. Trump then ordered the US government to stop using Anthropic and Pete Hegseth designated them as a supply chain risk. Following this, Anthropic released a new statement on the comments from ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth.

In a confusing turn, Sam Altman then posted on Twitter that OpenAI had reached an agreement with the ‘Department of War’ to deploy their models that included protections addressing the same issues that were a flashpoint with Anthropic. The US government then contradicted this in their own post saying their agreement with OpenAI allowed for “all lawful use” of their models. OpenAI’s full announcement is here - Our agreement with the Department of War

What a mess. Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million and could be barred from working with other defence contractors and it’s unclear whether OpenAI’s agreement has the same safeguards or not. It’s great to see the AI community standing up for what’s right and coming together at the right time, but I’m not sure how aligned the leaders of the frontier AI companies are with their employees. They have very quickly been walking back many of the self-imposed safety measures they insisted were vital to the safe deployment of advanced AI systems, creating a mockery of any idea of self-regulation.

Incidentally, all of this has been great publicity for Anthropic, whose Claude app has rocketed to the top of the App Store rankings off the back of all the news stories this week.

Google launches Nano Banana 2 model with faster image generation

Google launched the original Nano Banana model in August and followed that up with a Pro version in November. Since the launch it’s been the ‘best of breed’ image model and supplanted OpenAI’s ChatGPT Image model that everyone got very excited about back in March.

Now they’re out with v2 which promises faster generation, more realistic images, and resolutions ranging from 512px to 4K, in different aspect ratios. Impressively Nano Banana 2 can maintain character consistency for up to five characters and fidelity of up to 14 objects in one workflow.

Nano Banana 2 becomes the default image model across all Gemini apps, so I’m sure lots of people are having a lot of fun with it already!

TechCrunch | Google

Unitree Spring Festival Gala Robots

A little bit of robotics fun to end the week - for the last couple of years Unitree have really been pushing the limits of how humanoid robots can move and what their fleet syndicate of robots can do, all in sync is incredibly impressive and fun to watch.

No idea if any of these robots can do anything practical or useful, but I think this is likely to become the ‘drone display’ of 2026.

YouTube

Web 4.0

• ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users

• Google Gemini can book an Uber or order food for you

• OpenAI COO says ads will be ‘an iterative process’

• Perplexity’s new Computer is another bet that users need many AI models

• OpenAI COO says ‘we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes’

AI Ethics News

• An AI Thought Experiment on Substack Is Sending The Stock Market Spiraling

• Sam Altman defends AI’s energy toll by saying it also takes a lot to ‘train a human’

• The public opposition to AI infrastructure is heating up

• ‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies

• OpenAI raises $110B in one of the largest private funding rounds in history

• Police AI chief admits crime-fighting tech will have bias but vows to tackle it

• A Meta AI security researcher said an OpenClaw agent ran amok on her inbox

• Does Anthropic think Claude is alive? Define ‘alive’

Long Reads

• TechCrunch - The trap Anthropic built for itself

• The Verge - Why is AI so bad at reading PDFs?

• TechCrunch - The billion-dollar infrastructure deals powering the AI boom

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

We’ve had a week of small little releases from the big players with Gemini Pro 3.1 and Sonnet 4.6 both introduced. Google also released Lyria 3, it’s music generating model, and Anthropic released an interesting research study into Agent Autonomy.

In Web 4.0 news, Perplexity has decided it doesn’t think advertising in AI platforms works after all, and in Ethics News we have a now recurring theme around how AI impacts mental health, and how companies are ‘AI-washing’ mass layoffs.

In Long Reads, Ethan Mollick has an update to his regular Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era and there’s a good article from Benedict Evans on How will OpenAI compete?

Google’s new Gemini Pro model has record benchmark scores — again

On Thursday Google bumped its Gemini Pro model up to version 3.1, and it looks like it’s a big step up in capability. Google is highlighting it’s reasoning capabilities and says that it is ‘a smarter, more capable baseline for complex problem-solving‘.

TechCrunch | Google

Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6

Little bump in model number for Anthropic’s Sonnet (mid-tier) model that is the default for free and pro plan users. It doubles the context window to 1m tokens, which is a big help for coding tasks and Anthropic claim that early testers preferred it to their flagship Opus 4.5 model.

Anthropic are squarely aiming the release of Sonnet 4.6 at enterprise users, highlighting its improvements in Computer Use and automating ‘economically valuable office tasks‘.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Anthropic is aiming itself at building out the infrastructure that enterprises will need to fully embrace agentic coworkers in the near future and their Sonnet 4.6 model is a big stepping stone in that direction.

TechCrunch | Anthropic

Google introduces Lyria 3

This latest music generating model from Google looks much more steerable and sophisticated than previous offerings and is one of the few features available in Gemini that ChatGPT doesn’t have. I wonder if we’ll see OpenAI add music generation to its platform this year?

TBH, I’m not sure how I feel about music generating models, in the same way I’m unsure about image and video generating models. I think they will be amazing tools and great for creative workers to quickly play with new ideas and mock things up but I desperately don’t want them to replace the skills, craft, and artistry that exists in our world. This is probably how people felt about paintings when cameras were invented and what we saw was an evolution of painting and the birth of a new art form in photography. I hope we see the same sort of thing play out this time too.

YouTube | Google

Anthropic’s Agent Autonomy study

Really interesting insights here from Anthropic on how people are using Claude Code. Unsurprisingly it’s mostly used for software engineering, but as time goes on and people have found other uses for it, we’re seeing new use cases pop up, which I suspect was the catalyst for Anthropic to release Cowork which is powered by Claude Code.

It’s also interested to see how long Claude Code works for before stopping (c. 40 minutes, at a 99.9% success rate). For anyone who’s seen me talk about METR’s research that measures AI agents ability to complete long tasks, this is a a great comparison point. I usually present the 80th percentile graph (at an 80% success rate - see below) which shows how AI agents have been improving exponentially over the past few years in this regard.

I think we’re soon going to be seeing agents that can successfully (99.9% reliable) complete software engineering tasks for over an hour and we’ll soon start to see that trickle out to other types of tasks like the ones Anthropic highlighted in their research.

AI News | Anthropic

Web 4.0

• Perplexity switches sides in AI ad wars

• Google’s AI search results will make links more obvious

• India has 100M weekly active ChatGPT users, Sam Altman says

• OpenAI says 18- to 24-year-olds account for nearly 50% of ChatGPT usage in India

AI Ethics News

• Mind launches inquiry into AI and mental health after Guardian investigation

• Sam Altman Says Companies Are ‘AI Washing’ Layoffs

• There’s a New Term for Workers Freaking Out Over Being Replaced by AI

• Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing

• Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster ‘a real risk’, says leading expert

• A roadmap for evaluating moral competence in large language models

• Altman and Amodei share a moment of awkwardness at India’s big AI summit

Long Reads

• One Useful Thing - A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era

• Stratechery - Thin Is In

• Benedict Evans - How will OpenAI compete?

• New York Times - The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

This week’s newsletter is a bit more personal. Two AI-related stories caught my attention this week that directly challenge the productivity narrative we keep hearing. One shows people losing jobs to AI efficiencies. The other reveals what’s happening to those who keep their jobs: they’re not working less, they’re working more. As someone who uses AI heavily and has dealt with burnout, both hit uncomfortably close to home.

In more typical AI-related news though, there was just one thing that stood out, which was an update from OpenAI to Deep Research, a big feature I think is mostly slept on.

In Web 4.0 news, OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT, and Google previewed WebMCP, a new protocol for AI agent interactions. In Ethics news OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team and Anthropic said it’ll try to keep its data centers from raising electricity costs.

I also highly recommend the Long Read from the NY Times - I Left My Job at OpenAI. Putting Ads on ChatGPT Was the Last Straw.

UK ad agencies undergo their biggest exodus of staff as AI threatens industry

It’s fair to say that the ad industry has had a tough few weeks. There have been big losses reported, as well as a sell-off fuelled by a wider sell-off in tech stocks following the announcement of Claude Cowork. There’s also been lots of agency consolidation and marketing budgets have flatlined.

All of this has been building for a while, and has resulted in advertising agency staff in the UK shrinking by 7% YoY with creative agencies taking a bigger hit with a 14% drop.

It’s very easy to blame this on AI, but the reality is that the advertising industry is going through huge structural changes at the moment. This is mostly driven by how the advertising ecosystem has been changing over the last 5-10 years with shifts towards performance marketing, the rise of influencers, and the dominance of the large digital platforms.

AI will absolutely drive a lot of change throughout the advertising industry, and sadly this is being looked at very one dimensionally at the moment. This is being driven by an incredibly competitive agency market that is driving down prices which agencies are hoping to recoup in the medium term by finding AI-driven efficiencies, even though these efficiencies are yet to be realised. AI technology is still maturing, the infrastructure needed to fully leverage it needs building out, and new skills and ways of working need to be established. The human cost of this transition is already being felt, particularly among younger workers and recent graduates who are finding it increasingly difficult to break into the industry.

My hope is that AI will open up a huge amount of opportunity alongside the change that it will drive. AI platforms are now used by c.1.5bn people every week worldwide and have matured into a viable marketing channel in their own right. Helping brands navigate this exciting and emerging space will require a lot of knowledge and expertise and advertising agencies should be well placed to provide this if they’re able to make the right investments and not just focus on cost cutting and efficiencies.

The Guardian

The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most

While the previous article looked at job losses in the advertising industry, recent research published in Harvard Business Review reveals what’s already happening to those who retain their jobs. As someone who has suffered from burnout and is a big user of AI, this particularly resonated with me.

What this study found was that workers are adopting AI because it feels empowering, but this leads to taking on more tasks and doing more multitasking. The researchers describe this as a self-reinforcing cycle: AI accelerates tasks, which raises expectations for speed, which makes workers more reliant on AI, which expands the scope of what they attempt, which further increases workload. Workers found themselves taking on tasks that used to require specialists, prompting AI during lunch breaks, and juggling multiple AI-assisted workflows simultaneously, all of which felt productive in the moment but accumulated unsustainably.

This directly undermines the efficiency logic driving job cuts in the ad industry. When agencies reduce headcount expecting AI to fill the gap, they’re not creating sustainable efficiency, they’re redistributing work to fewer people who will work at higher intensity. The productivity gains are real in spreadsheet terms, but they’re achieved by extracting more from those who remain.

The danger is that the cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making that follows are lagging indicators - it will take time for the signs to appear. The question is whether organisations will recognise this dynamic before the initial productivity surge gives way to the inevitable crash. Because right now, most are doubling down on the efficiency narrative while the teams using AI every day are quietly drowning under an ever-expanding workload.

TechCrunch | HBR

OpenAI Updates Deep Research

OpenAI released some nice updates to Depp Research in ChatGPT this week allowing users to specify sources to search and to be able to update research with new sections and analysis after the initial run.

I think Deep Research is one of those ‘slept on’ capabilities in the AI world - hugely useful and powerful when you use it, but I don’t think many people do.

The Verge | YouTube

Web 4.0

• ChatGPT’s cheapest options now show you ads

• Here are the brands bringing ads to ChatGPT

• Google previews WebMCP, a new protocol for AI agent interactions

• Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads mocking AI with ads helped push Claude’s app into the top 10

AI Ethics News

• EU Issues Warning to Meta Over Closing Off WhatsApp to AI Rivals

• OpenAI disbands mission alignment team, which focused on ‘safe’ and ‘trustworthy’ AI development

• Anthropic says it’ll try to keep its data centers from raising electricity costs

• ‘At 2am, it feels like someone’s there’: why Nigerians are choosing chatbots to give them advice and therapy

• Researchers Jailbreak ChatGPT to Find Out Which State Has the Laziest People

• The evolution of OpenAI’s mission statement

Long Reads

• NY Times - I Left My Job at OpenAI. Putting Ads on ChatGPT Was the Last Straw

• Harvard Business Review - AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

We had two big rival model releases this week - Claude Opus 4.6 from Anthropic and GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI. Both focused on coding. Both big deals for agentic AI. Anthropic also released their Super Bowl ad, taking a pop at OpenAI testing ads in ChatGPT, and Boston Dynamics released a fun Atlas video.

There’s a small number of Web 4.0 and Ethics News articles - Gemini has now surpassed 750m weekly users, very quickly closing the gap with ChatGPT. There’s also a report on the $100bn NVIDIA/OpenAI deal and the security challenges inherent in OpenClaw.

There are also a good couple of Long Reads to check out - Enjoy!

Anthropic releases Opus 4.6 with new ‘agent teams’

On Thursday Anthropic released the latest version of its flagship model, Opus, bumping it to 4.6, up from the 4.5 version which was only released in November last year.

The big focus of this update is on the model’s coding skills, especially as these skills are what are starting to unlock a lot of amazing agentic capabilities, including helping people with ‘everyday’ tasks in their Cowork application.

On the same day, OpenAI also introduced GPT-5.3 Codex. Again, the focus here is on coding capabilities, but OpenAI haven’t started applying this to helping people with ‘everyday’ tasks. I suspect we’ll see something big from OpenAI in this space in the next few months.

Mark Andreessen said in 2011 that "Software is eating the world". Now AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are eating software, and beginning to control the world by proxy.

Anthropic | TechCrunch | OpenAI

Anthropic says ‘Claude will remain ad-free,’ unlike ChatGPT

In Anthropic’s Super Bowl spot they have taken a pop at OpenAI for testing ads in ChatGPT. Sam Altman got exceptionally testy over this and the whole thing has highlighted that there is still a huge rivalry between the two companies.

For the last couple of years it has seemed like OpenAI were very focused on Google Deepmind as their main rival and Anthropic were happily focusing more on the enterprise market and catering specifically to developers with the coding capabilities of their models and Claude Code.

But as coding skills have become more central to agentic AI over the last 3 months the rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic has really heated up, culminating in the joint releases of Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex this week. It’s great to see the competition driving capabilities forward, and I hope they don’t get too distracted by taking pops at each other - there’s plenty of room for lots of different AI platforms in the future.

The Verge | TechCrunch

Atlas Airborne

The research version on Atlas has reached the end of the line, now that they’re heading into full production, so the researchers thought they’d really try and push the limits of what it could do. Pretty impressive!

YouTube

Web 4.0

• New Voice Assistants Are Officially a Whiff (for Now)

• Google’s Gemini app has surpassed 750M monthly active users | TechCrunch

AI Ethics News

• Millions of books died so Claude could live

• What does the disappearance of a $100bn deal mean for the AI economy?

• OpenClaw’s AI ‘skill’ extensions are a security nightmare

Long Reads

• Stratechery - Microsoft and Software Survival

• Artificial Ignorance - The Codex App Has Upended My Daily Workflow

• Latent Space - Experts Have World Models. LLMs Have Word Models

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

This week the hype train around Molbot (now OpenClaw) really reached a crescendo, and I explain a little bit about what it is, and why I think it’s important, in this week’s newsletter below. Google also introduced their latest iteration of Project Genie, and Figure AI showed off Helix 02.

In Web 4.0 news, it’s been a long time coming but the UK’s CMA ruled that media groups should be allowed to opt out of Google AI Overviews without also opting out of Google Search and YouTube Overtook Reddit as the Go-To Citation Source for AI Platforms.

In Long Reads, Dario Amodei published his latest essay on The Adolescence of Technology, Ethan Mollick wrote about Management as AI superpower and Charlie Guo shared his thoughts on OpenClaw.

Moltbot (now OpenClaw), the AI agent that ‘actually does things,’ is tech’s new obsession

Ok, so we need to talk about Moltbot (previously Clawdbot, but now OpenClaw). There’s a chance not many of my readers have heard of it yet, but it has completely blown up in the last few weeks in tech circles.

In short, it’s an AI agent that anyone (with some tech know-how) can spin up and connect to lots of different services (calendar, email, notes, reminders, music, smart home appliances, you name it!). This allows the agent to do lots of different things for people and is semi-autonomous in that it can be proactive and be triggered by lots of different events.

The reason this has blown up is that people have seen what an unrestrictive, proactive personal assistant can do. But there are some drawbacks. Not only is it quite technical to set up (fixable) but there are also lots of obvious security and privacy risks with giving an AI agent unfettered access to some of your most personal services and content.

I think what this points to is two things. First, we’re seeing the pent up demand from Siri/Google Assistant still not being very capable play out. Secondly, we’re seeing the power of the agentic ecosystem that’s been built out - first with MCP and more recently with Skills. This means that it’s now relatively trivial to connect an AI agent to lots of different things. And if the connection you need hasn’t already been built then it’s relative quick and simple to build it yourself with agentic coding tools like Claude Code and Codex.

So what should we make of this? I think it’s very exciting and definitely points towards how useful AI agents could generally be for people. I think most consumers will see some of this when the next generation of Siri launches in the next couple of months. But I also think that it’s going to take some time for this technology to mature to the extent that it’s secure and private, but still very useful. I’m long on Apple being the ones to get this right, despite being (relatively) slow to the generative AI party.

And if you really want to blow your mind you should check out Moltbook, which Simon Willison says is the most interesting place on the internet right now. It’s essentially Reddit for people’s AI agents (not just OpenClaw). At the very least its a curiosity, and at its most extreme shows how weird an AGI “take-off” scenario might look if one happened for real.

This is definitely the weirdest, most interesting, and more exciting thing that’s happening in AI so far this year, so one to pay attention to.

The Verge | Gizmodo | OpenClaw | Moltbook | Simon Willison | Ethan Mollick

Google Introduce Project Genie

I first wrote about Genie back in March 2024, and followed up writing about the third generation back in August last year. It’s been a fascinating project to watch and where it’s got to now is slightly mind blowing.

It doesn’t have an obvious use case yet beyond rapid prototyping of games, and you could see the potential here for VR, but even just watching the introductory video hints at what this could become.

My favourite example is probably when someone takes a picture of their cat which then allows them to explore the room in the photo from the cat’s perspective - bonkers!

The Verge | Project Genie | YouTube

Introducing Helix 02

NGL - I never thought I’d want to watch a video of something unpacking and repacking a dishwasher, but here we are in 2026 and there’s something strangely compelling about it.

This is a typical humanoid robotics demo video that we’ve seen a lot of before, but there are two important differences with this one. The first difference is that this is a single neural network controlling the robot, which should be more effective than previous approaches. The second is that the movement of the robot is starting to look more ‘human-like’ which I think is encouraging. If you want an example of what I mean, skip to 3:15 in the video where the robot uses its foot to close the dishwasher, something many of you have probably done hundreds of times without even thinking about it.

I think what we’re going to see over the coming years is humanoid robotic movement becoming more and more ‘human-like’, which will both make robots more effective at navigating our world, and simultaneously make us more comfortable around them. We’ll then just have to figure out what to do about the noise they make when they move!

Figure AI | YouTube

Web 4.0

• UK media groups should be allowed to opt out of Google AI Overviews, CMA says

• YouTube Overtakes Reddit as Go-To Citation Source on AI Search

• OpenAI is working out how much to charge for ChatGPT ads

• OpenAI projects 220 million paying ChatGPT users by 2030, The Information Reports

• Shopify Merchants to Pay 4% Fee on ChatGPT Checkout Sales

• OpenAI’s Sora app is struggling after its stellar launch

• Anthropic launches interactive Claude apps, including Slack and other workplace tools

• Google adds Gemini AI-powered ‘auto browse’ to Chrome

AI Ethics News

• At Davos, tech CEOs laid out their vision for AI’s world domination

• X faces EU investigation over Grok’s sexualized deepfakes

• ‘Among the worst we’ve seen’: report slams xAI’s Grok over child safety failures

• Government offers UK adults free AI training for work

• South Korea’s ‘world-first’ AI laws face pushback amid bid to become leading tech power

• DeepMind’s New AI Can Read a Million DNA Letters at Once—and Actually Understand Them

• OpenAI launches Prism, a new AI workspace for scientists

• AI-generated news should carry ‘nutrition’ labels, thinktank says

Long Reads

• Dario Amodei - The Adolescence of Technology

• One Useful Thing - Management as AI superpower

• Artificial Ignorance - Humans Welcome to Observe

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

It was a relatively quiet week this week on the AI front. Mostly that was down to most technology leaders being at Davos and so there was very little news beyond this. Anthropic did publish their new AI ‘constitution’ though and there was a good article in the FT about how robots are currently only half as efficient as humans.

In Web 4.0 news, OpenAI say that they’re now focused on the ‘practical adoption’ of AI and Google DeepMind’s CEO said he was surprised OpenAI are rushing forwards with ads so soon.

In Ethics News there were reports that Grok generated about 3m sexualised images in 11 days and a good piece from The Verge about how Google won’t stop replacing their headlines.

Tech CEOs boast and bicker about AI at Davos

The big event of the week was at Davos, which seems to have become more and more of a platform for technology leaders, and less about global economic policy.

This year was no exception with Bill Gates warning about AI investment hype, Dario Amodei criticising NVIDIA, Jensen Huang encouraging the ‘largest infrastructure building out in human history’, Satya Nadella warning AI could lose ‘social permission’, and Elon Musk making lots of wild predictions.

In all honesty, I’m not sure there was anything of substance shared by any of the technology leaders that took to the stage. I did appreciate what Julie Sweet, Accenture’s CEO said when she pointed out that “If leaders don’t understand AI, they can’t lead.”. This is very true, I think it’s incredibly difficulty to truly understand the potential of generative AI until you’ve spent a significant amount of time with it.

Techcrunch

Anthropic’s new Claude ‘constitution’: be helpful and honest, and don’t destroy humanity

Anthropic published their previous ‘constitution’ in May 2023, so this is a long overdue update given how far and fast the technology has progressed. The new version is a huge 57 pages, and isn’t to be confused with Claude’s system prompt which is its direct instruction set.

The headline with the new ‘constitution’ is that Anthropic now says that they want AI to “understand why we want them to behave in certain ways rather than just specifying what we want them to do”. Anthropic want Claude to operate autonomously but also have an understanding of itself and its place in the world. Anthropic believe that this so-called “psychological security, sense of self, and wellbeing … may bear on Claude’s integrity, judgement, and safety.”

I love the fact that Anthropic are not only thinking about this stuff, but are also incredibly transparent about it. I don’t think it’s 100% necessary with today’s AI models, but this does lay important foundations for if AI models do start to become a lot more sophisticated.

The Verge | Anthropic

Robots only half as efficient as humans, says leading Chinese producer

In some ways, this isn’t surprising as I wouldn’t expect humanoid robots to be anywhere near as efficient as people yet. In other ways, 50% as efficient is amazing because humanoid robots don’t need to stop/sleep so can work for longer. So they might be 50% as efficient hour-to-hour but could still be 100% as efficient day-to-day.

UBTech hope to boost the performance of its robots to 80 per cent of human performance by 2027, which if you apply my basic maths mean they will be more efficient than human workers day-to-day which is a very important tipping point. And by 2027 could only be 11-23 months away. Crazy 🤯.

FT | Archive

Web 4.0

• OpenAI’s 2026 ‘focus’ is ‘practical adoption’

• Google DeepMind CEO is ‘surprised’ OpenAI is rushing forward with ads in ChatGPT

• Ads are coming to ChatGPT. Do brands want in?

• ChatGPT Searches Google Shopping to Create its Recommendation

AI Ethics News

• Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in 11 days, study finds

• Google won’t stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI

• UK exposed to ‘serious harm’ by failure to tackle AI risks, MPs warn

• Meta pauses teen access to AI characters ahead of new version

• Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

• Scarlett Johansson and Cate Blanchett back campaign accusing AI firms of theft

• OpenAI says its data centers will pay for their own energy and limit water usage

• Giving your healthcare info to a chatbot is, unsurprisingly, a terrible idea

• In an effort to protect young users, ChatGPT will now predict how old you are

• Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries, study suggests

• Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

Big week!

On Friday evening (UK time) OpenAI announced that it is going to start testing ads in ChatGPT in the US for Free and Go subscribers (a new, cheaper tier they also launched on Friday). Anthropic also launched Cowork this week, a new productivity assistant mode in the Claude Mac app that looks incredibly impressive. Apple announced that it is partnering with Google to power their next generation of Siri and there’s a new Gemini beta feature that will allow it to be a much more personal and proactive assistant.

There are some good Long Reads this week too with The AI Manager’s Schedule from ignorance.ai that is a good companion piece to Anthropic’s launch of Claude Cowork and an article from The Verge on why Gemini is winning.

OpenAI starts testing ads in ChatGPT

This is a big one, and something that the marketing industry has been waiting for/expecting for a long time! OpenAI announced on Friday evening (UK time) that it’s going to start testing ads in the coming weeks for logged in adults in the U.S. on the free and Go tiers. They’re not launching ads yet, just testing for now.

OpenAI’s reasoning for testing ads is that they want to make sure that everyone on their platform has the opportunity to “have a personal super-assistant that helps them learn and do almost anything“. They want more people to benefit from their tools with fewer usage limits and without having to pay.

Test ads will appear at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on a user’s current conversation. Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from the content from ChatGPT and users will be able to learn more about why they see particular ads, or dismiss any ad and tell OpenAI why. Also, ads won’t be shown to under 18s or appear near sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health or politics.

OpenAI’s ads principles

OpenAI has very publicly shared the principles that they have put in place whilst developing the advertising product on ChatGPT and that will continue to guide them as they develop ads further:

• Mission alignment: Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible.

• Answer independence: Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.

• Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.

• Choice and control: You control how your data is used. You can turn off personalisation, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time. We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free.

• Long-term value: We do not optimise for time spent in ChatGPT. We prioritise user trust and user experience over revenue.

OpenAI says it plans to share more about how brands can advertise within ChatGPT in the coming weeks, and I’ll share more thoughts and information over the coming weeks as we learn more.

Alongside this, OpenAI Also expanded ChatGPT Go worldwide, which is their lower cost subscription model that they had been testing in India to great success. ChatGPT Go is $8 per month and it gives free users access to a larger context window, more file uploads, and more image generations. You can see a comparison between all the different plans now available here.

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Anthropic wants you to use Claude to ‘Cowork’ in latest AI agent push

This looks incredibly impressive and if Simon Willison’s first impressions are anything to go by as well, I think we’ll see OpenAI and Google quickly come to the table with their own versions of this too.

Sadly I haven’t been able to try Claude Cowork out for myself yet as a bug (logged with Anthropic) is preventing me from getting it up and running on my Mac, but from what I’ve seen from other people’s experiences, I’m very excited about this. Cowork has the potential to turn Claude from a chat experience into a proper assistant that can help me across a wide range of tasks and stop me from constantly copy/pasting, attaching files, searching for things and all the other peripheral admin that goes hand-in-hand with working inside a generative AI chat interface currently.

I think a lot of businesses will get a lot of value out of Claude Cowork when they start to deploy it, connect it to internal knowledge bases, and start building out proprietary skills for it (which is very easy!). This is definitely one to experiment with and keep an eye on.

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Apple picks Google’s Gemini AI for its big Siri upgrade

So, Apple has chosen Google to power their next generation of Siri and to not go with solely in-house developed AI models or to extend their partnership with OpenAI, who apparently turned down this opportunity.

Announced on Monday, this is a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. Details are thin on the ground, which is to be expected at the stage, and I think we’ll hear much more about this at WWDC 26 this summer.

There’s a good article from the FT around this that’s worth checking out here.

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Gemini’s new beta feature provides proactive responses based on your photos, emails, and more

This is a really interesting new beta feature in Gemini - allowing it to understand the broader context of all of your Google content without being told where to look. Google call it Personalised Intelligence.

I’ve written previously about how AI assistants need to become more personalised and proactive, and this is a step in that direction. I think these features are important to make AI assistants much more useful in our day-to-day lives, but this obviously needs careful balancing with privacy features and ensuring that the user is in control at all times.

With Personalised Intelligence, connecting your Google data to Gemini is off by default and users decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off at anytime. This hasn’t had much attention this week, but I think this is going to be huge for Google. Not only will it make Gemini much more useful, but it’s something that only really Google can deliver on, so could be a big differentiator for them in the future.

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Web 4.0

• Publishers fear AI search summaries and chatbots mean ‘end of traffic era’

• Google brings buy buttons to Gemini and AI search

• Google and Walmart Join Forces to Shape the Future of Retail

• I saw the future of retail, and it’s all AI

AI Ethics News

• Sadiq Khan to urge ministers to act over ‘colossal’ impact of AI on London jobs

• X still allowing users to post sexualised images generated by Grok AI tool

• West Midlands police chief apologises after AI error used to justify Maccabi Tel Aviv ban

• Anthropic announces Claude for Healthcare following OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health reveal

Long Reads

• Ignorance.ai - The AI Manager’s Schedule

• The Verge - Gemini is winning

• The Guardian - AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

Another quiet week on the AI front, if you discount some of the crazy AI-related announcement at CES! Although in all seriousness, I think unlike last year we are starting to see some genuinely useful applications of AI now coming through. OpenAI also launched ChatGPT Health this week, and Boston Dynamics showed off their production-ready version of Atlas which is very exciting!

There was a small amount of ethics-related news, and obviously the big headlines are around the terrible and in-defensible image generating capabilities of Grok.

In Long Reads there are some more good wraps ups of 2025 and looks ahead to 2026 worth checking out. Great article from Stratechery on AI and the Human Condition as well.

Best of CES 2026

Just like last year, AI was being thrown at everything at CES 2026. But this year felt like a turning point. Instead of AI features awkwardly bolted onto kitchen appliances, we’re seeing AI embedded into products where it kind pf makes sense: smart scales focused more on long term health, robot vacuums that can finally climb stairs, and autonomous driving systems that handle real-world chaos in San Francisco.

There were lots of other interesting products announced at CES and top among them were the AI companions. Ecovacs’ Lil Milo is a fluffy robot dog that does essentially nothing except react to your presence and develop a personality over time. It joins products like Zeroth’s WALL-E-inspired W1 and Fuzozo’s purring puffball in a growing category of machines designed for little purpose beyond existing. If these companies are to be believed, AI should start leaving our screens and take on a physical and emotional presence in our lives.

I said last year that it takes humanity a while to catch up and work out what to do with new technology. CES 2026 suggests we’re finally getting there. The use cases for AI are just about starting to crystallise, and they’re not always what we expected. Some are practical, some are emotional, and some are still a bit questionable. But the gap between hype and meaningful implementation is definitely narrowing.

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OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health, encouraging users to connect their medical records

People have been using ChatGPT for health queries ever since it launched, and today over 230 million people ask health-related questions every week. But individual conversations are very different from a dedicated health experience with connected medical records, which is much harder to secure, regulate, and deploy responsibly.

This week OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health, which is a separate encrypted space within ChatGPT where you can connect medical records, and platforms like Apple Health, for personalised health guidance. The initial rollout excludes the UK, EEA, and Switzerland entirely, which highlights that OpenAI have more work to do with the regulators in these regions.

Whilst OpenAI collaborated with 260+ doctors in the development of ChatGPT Health, it isn’t HIPAA compliant and they avoided mentioning mental health despite the documented risks and recent headlines. There’s been lots of research showing how AI models can benefit healthcare, but the challenge is really with the regulators and whether they can keep up with the pace of change.

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Boston Dynamics’ Tesla Bot rival Atlas will start building Hyundai cars in 2028

Boston Dynamics have been at the forefront of robotics for the last 35 years and they’ve had lots of success with the commercialisation of Spot over the last 5 years. But Spot isn’t a bipedal humanoid robot, which is much harder to develop, produce at scale and commercialise.

I’ve been very excited about Atlas since Boston Dynamics announced that they were moving away from hydraulics to a fully electric version nearly two years ago. I knew it would take them a while to dial in how to mass produce the new version of Atlas, and I have to say that I absolutely love what they shared this week in the video above. The production version of Atlas looks fantastic, and the ambition to manufacture 30,000 of them per year from 2028 is impressive.

I don’t think we’re going to really see and feel the impact of humanoid robotics until around 2030, but it’s definitely coming and its going to be fascinating to watch how it all plays out.

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Web 4.0

• Microsoft Edge is getting a Copilot-inspired redesign

• Microsoft will put buy buttons directly in Copilot

AI Ethics News

• Now Musk’s Grok chatbot is creating sexualised images of children. If the law won’t stop it, perhaps his investors will

• ‘Dangerous and alarming’: Google removes some of its AI summaries after users’ health put at risk

• Leading AI expert delays timeline for its possible destruction of humanity

• Google and Character.AI negotiate first major settlements in teen chatbot death cases

• OpenAI is reportedly asking contractors to upload real work from past jobs

Long Reads

• Stratechery - AI and the Human Condition

• Simon Willison - LLM predictions for 2026

• One Useful Thing - Claude Code and What Comes Next

• Ignorance.ai - 10 AI Stories That Shaped 2025

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2026!

As we’re only 4 days into the year, there isn’t a huge amount of generative AI news to report, but I thought it worth sharing a few of the annual wrap ups (I’m sure more will be published this coming week too) as well as some of the interesting things I’ve seen over the festive break.

Enjoy!

2025: The year in LLMs

This is a great wrap up on 2025 from Simon Willison, one of my favourite AI commentators. Highlights include:

• The year of reasoning

• The year of long tasks

• The year that OpenAI lost its lead

• The year of Gemini

• The year of alarmingly AI-enabled browsers

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How ChatGPT is Changing How We Speak

I’ve been fascinated with language for a while now and have shared news reports previously on the rise of words like ‘delve’ as well as a whole new vocabulary we’re having to invent around AI like word of the year ‘slop’.

What’s important for people to be aware of though is that there’s a very strong link between language and beliefs. This is a great video that explains this better than I can, but essentially we are now in a place where generative AI models are trained on a representation of reality (from data on the internet), but these AI models are now being used by so many people that they’re influencing reality (hence why people are adopting ‘AI-speak’ in everyday language).

Worth a watch.

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2025: The year of the recap

I thought it would be fun to share some of the stats and commentary from my Year with ChatGPT, which summarised everything I’ve been doing with it throughout 2025.

To put this in context, I was a heavy Claude user in the first half of the year, but switched to ChatGPT being my daily driver in the summer as I was finding it more capable and was getting frustrated by the limits on the Claude Pro plan. Despite that, turns out I have used ChatGPT a lot (who knew?!). Here are some of the interesting things I found in my 2025 wrap up:

• I’m in the top 3% of messages sent and the first 20% of users to try out new features, which is probably a good thing given my job!

• Don’t tell my boss (🤓) but apparently I’m most likely to automate my job, but then at least I’ll tell everyone about it and how I did it!

• My archetype is ‘The Strategist"‘, which I share with 3.6% of users. This is defined as using ChatGPT to synthesise information, explore new concepts, and guide direction which is a pretty good summary of what I use it for.

Just a bit of fun mostly, but will be interesting to see how this compares to the 2026 wrap up in 12 months time!

Web 4.0

With the rise of the chat interface, I’m convinced that we’ll finally see voice become a primary mode for user interactions. We haven’t seen this really take off with any of the smart speakers, home assistants, or mobile assistants and it’s been a very slow burn over the last 10+ years. But, I think this will change in the next few years, so it was unsurprising (to me at least!) to see that OpenAI is betting big on audio as Silicon Valley declares war on screens.

AI Ethics News

• Bernie Sanders criticizes AI as ‘the most consequential technology in humanity’

• Elon Musk’s Grok AI generates images of ‘minors in minimal clothing’

• AI boom adds more than half a trillion dollars to wealth of US tech barons in 2025

• Nvidia insists it isn’t Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith

• European banks plan to cut 200,000 jobs as AI takes hold

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT ‘Wrapped’ Is a Good Reminder to Check Your Privacy Settings

• Prominent Canadian Musician Says Gig Was Cancelled After Google AI Overview Wrongly Branded Him Sex Pest

Long Reads

• Understanding AI - 17 predictions for AI in 2026

• Peter Steinberger - Shipping at Inference-Speed

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

As is becoming the norm in the generative AI space, it’s been a busy end to the year! This week Google launched Gemini 3 Flash, OpenAI launched a new Image model as well as an App Store for ChatGPT. There was also a great video on why we should be focused on building skills for agents instead of building multiple agents that I thought was worth sharing.

In Long Reads its worth checking out Ethan Mollick’s article on The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients and Charlie Guo’s AI Trends for 2026.

That’s a wrap from me for 2025 - I’ll be taking a week’s break over the festive period and so the next newsletter will land on the first Sunday of the new year. 2026 is shaping up to be another busy and fascinating year!

Gemini 3 Flash: frontier intelligence built for speed

Quickly following the launch of Gemini 3 Pro we now have the Flash variety and it’s an impressive model that outperforms Gemini 2.5 Pro while being 3x faster. Gemini 3 Flash is able to modulate how much it thinks but it also uses 30% fewer tokens on average than 2.5 Pro.

I have to say that the speed of the Gemini 3 family of models is incredibly impressive and probably something only Google can pull off at this point, with the huge amount of cloud infrastructure they have at their disposal. For every day use cases, I think this is a much bigger deal than the general intelligence of a model as all the frontier models are now ‘good enough’ at ‘most things’.

Despite having a relatively quiet year, especially compared to OpenAI, Google have finished on a huge high and as we head into 2026 they are definitely ahead with the fastest and most capable generative AI models.

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OpenAI’s new flagship image generator AI is here

OpenAI continues its response to Google’s recent releases with the launch of a new Image model for ChatGPT. Tellingly, this is GPT Image 1.5, so not a full version release, so there is more to come. In the meantime, this new Image model is better at following instructions, which allows it to be much better at editing images, and it’s also up to 4x faster at image generation.

I’m not sure I quite agree with OpenAI’s claims that it’s “more like a creative studio.” but it’s great to see continued improvements in this space.

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Don’t Build Agents, Build Skills Instead

2025 was definitely hyped to be the ‘year of AI Agents’ but I still think we’re too early in the development of the technology to really be able to claim that. The thinking around how Agents are built, shared, and used has certainly moved on though and a large majority of this work is being done by Anthropic.

Anthropic released Model Context Protocol (MCP) just over 12 months ago and it quickly became the industry standard for how AI Agents interact with other technologies. A couple of months ago they released a new standard for AI Agents called ‘Skills’, which are likely to become an even bigger deal.

To summaries, 12 months ago everyone thought they’d need to build specialised Agents for different tasks. Turns out that a better approach is you can have one general agent that has lots of specialist skills. You might ask what the real difference is, but it turns out to be a lot! Agents are hard to build, Skills are incredibly easy to build - anyone can do it really with a little help from an AI model.

So I think 2026 will be the ‘year of AI Skills’ and if you’re interested in learning more, the short video above is well worth a watch.

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The ChatGPT App Store is here

I’ve started writing recently about how OpenAI wants to rebuild the internet inside ChatGPT, and this is a big piece of that puzzle. With the launch of the ChatGPT App Store, not only are major digital services now available inside of ChatGPT, but it makes the chat interface itself a much more vibrant and interactive experience.

All of the Apps available inside ChatGPT’s App Store are understandably very basic to start off with and are mostly ‘read-only’. The Apple Music app, for example, can’t list any of the music in my library and it can’t play more than a short preview of any song. But it can suggest songs, create a playlist, and tell you which of the songs it’s selected are already in your library, and allows you to add songs to your library. Not a bad start.

There are good showings from Adobe, Google, and Microsoft in ChatGPT’s App Store and as you can imagine, there are lots of productivity and ‘lifestyle’ apps. Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT’s App Store for approval so I expect this ecosystem to get built out over the course of next year. I fully expect many major digital services to have a ChatGPT App next year, and it will be interesting to see how consumer adoption goes.

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Web 4.0

• Mozilla’s new CEO says AI is coming to Firefox, but will remain a choice

• Google wants its AI assistant CC to replace your morning scroll

• OpenAI Defaults Free Users to Cheapest Model to Cut Back on Costs

AI Ethics News

• Deloitte’s CTO on a stunning AI transformation stat: Companies are spending 93% on tech and only 7% on people

• AI likely to displace jobs, says Bank of England governor

• AI boom has caused same CO2 emissions in 2025 as New York City, report claims

• Boost for artists in AI copyright battle as only 3% back UK active opt-out plan

Long Reads

• One Useful Thing - The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients

• Artificial Ignorance - AI Trends for 2026

• Fidji Simo - The shift from text to more dynamic AI experiences

• The Guardian - What will your life look like in 2035?

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

It’s been an interesting GenAI news week with OpenAI’s rapid release of GPT-5.2 (only a month after GPT-5.1), but more significant I think is the 3-year licensing deal they struck with Disney. There was also the release of a controversial AI-generated ad from McDonalds in the Netherlands and Google showed off a new prototype web browser that generates interactive apps as tabs.

There was lots of Web 4.0 news as well with Google announcing that they would be bringing ads to Gemini next year and also being investigated for anti-competitive practices with AI Overviews and AI Mode in search. OpenAI also announced a partnership with Instacart to help power Instant Checkout.

There were some interesting AI Ethics articles too with a report that a quarter of UK teenagers use AI chatbots for mental health support and Trump signed an executive order to ban state level AI laws.

GPT-5.2 is OpenAI’s latest move in the agentic AI battle

So, this is OpenAI’s reaction to Google’s release of Gemini 3 a few weeks ago. It’s a point release in name, but I think it is probably more capable than the point would suggest. I’d peg this at a 0.5 model and that’s mostly because of the gains OpenAI has made with how useful it is in real life, and especially in professional settings.

As Ethan Mollick pointed out, GPT-5.2 posted a really impressive score on GDPval, which pits models against humans on tasks that require 4-8 hours of work. GPT-5.2 scored 70.9% when the previous best score was under 50% - that’s a huge increase!

The release of GPT-5.2 paves the way for OpenAI to evolve ChatGPT into a more “personalised assistant”, which is what I think we’ll see next year when GPT-5.5 is released.

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OpenAI’s billion-dollar Disney deal puts Mickey Mouse and Marvel in Sora

I’m going to file this under ‘big deal’. It was only a matter of time before a large IP owner decided to jump into generative content with both feet, I’m just a little surprised it’s Disney and that they’re getting into it in such a big way!

Just as a reminder, the new Sora model and social app only arrived 10 weeks ago, and in that time it has been the catalyst for this deal which comes with a $1bn investment from Disney in OpenAI. Astounding.

The three-year licensing deal allows Sora (and ChatGPT Images) to generate more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars including costumes, props, vehicles, and iconic locations. The key here is ‘animated, masked and creature characters’ - this does not give OpenAI licence to recreate the likeness of any actors that portrayed any Disney owned characters in live action, or to use their voices. As part of the announcement, Disney also said that Sora-generated content will start to appear on Disney Plus next year. Hmmmm, not sure how that will go down with the general public, but I might be surprised!

I do think that this is overall a good thing. IP owners should retain ownership of their property and generate revenue from it. But I also think it’s good that consumers can play around with that content - remix it, repurpose it, and immerse themselves in it. Hopefully it won’t just be the large corporate IP owners that can benefit from this and any IP owner can start striking similar deals.

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Everyone Hated the McDonald’s AI Christmas Ad So Much It Got Taken Down

I don’t actually think this is the worst AI-generated ad (😜) I’ve seen, but the backlash was so strong it’s now effectively been scrubbed from the internet.

Yes, it’s another example of low-effort AI slop in mainstream advertising, and yes, it was almost certainly made quickly and cheaply. But the reaction seems to hinge less on the use of AI itself and more on the creative choice to frame Christmas as “the most terrible time of the year”, which landed badly for obvious reasons.

It’s a useful reminder of one of the core problems with generative AI lowering the cost and friction of making content. When it becomes this easy to produce work at scale, editorial judgement matters so much more. Just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should.

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Google is building an experimental new browser and a new kind of web app

When Google released Gemini 3 a few weeks ago I briefly wrote about Generative Interfaces so it’s great to see them experimenting with this more.

Disco is a variant of Google’s Chrome browser that includes a concept called GenTabs which is essentially a custom app for whatever you’re trying to do. Each GenTab is generated by Gemini but can be directed and amended by the user. For example, instead of just writing you an itinerary for a trip to Japan it will build an interactive app for the trip that has all the recommendations for the trip in a calendar and on a map. Users can open tabs of where they would like to go and GenTab will add them to the itinerary alongside its recommendations..

Google haven’t quite worked out what GenTab is yet - whether it creates throw away one-off apps or whether the apps should have more permanence and be shareable. The answer is probably both - I can see people wanting to keep and share some apps, but others are just a one-off.

I’m really excited to see where this takes us - generative interfaces will play a big part of how we interact online, we’re just not quite there yet.

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Web 4.0

• Google Tells Advertisers It’ll Bring Ads to Gemini in 2026

• Google Zero is under investigation by the EU

• Google says it will link to more sources in AI Mode

• Instacart and OpenAI partner on AI shopping experiences

• Alexa Plus can automatically buy stuff when the price drops

• Google is building an experimental new browser and a new kind of web app

• Chrome for iPhone rolling out built-in Gemini integration

• OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block join new Linux Foundation effort to standardize the AI agent era

AI Ethics News

• ‘I feel it’s a friend’: quarter of teenagers turn to AI chatbots for mental health support

• Trump signs AI executive order pushing to ban state laws

• Scores of UK parliamentarians join call to regulate most powerful AI systems

• Evidence That Humans Now Speak in a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger

• ‘We are truly doomed’: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard despair at AI clone appearing on Spotify

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

This week wasn’t one for big headline, frontier AI releases, but its been an interesting one with a great video from Bernie Sanders about the threats from AI, a huge set of open-weight models released from Mistral and Runway launched their latest text-to-video model.

There was some interesting Web 4.0 news this week as well with reports that AI shopping grew significantly year on year over the Black Friday period with both Amazon’s Rufus and ChatGPT driving sales. There was also a report that ChatGPT’s growth has stalled and lots more rumours about their incoming advertising product.

There’s also a good Long Read from Stratechery on Google, NVIDIA, and OpenAI that’s worth checking out.

The threats from AI are real

Sometimes Bernie says it best, and it’s great to see a US senator taking a proper look at AI technology and the issues we’re all facing around it. My only bugbear in these debates is how we talk about risk: people frame the ‘threat of AI’ as if the technology itself is dangerous, when in reality the danger lies in the choices humans make when building and using it. Technology isn’t a threat on its own.

Below are some of the questions that Bernie raises and says must be answered as AI brings about an unprecedented transformation of society:

• Are we comfortable with the Billionaire class controlling AI without any democratic input or oversight?

• What impact will AI and robotics have on our economy and the lives of working people?

• What impact will AI have on democracy?

• Could AI redefine what it means to be a human being?

• What impact is AI having on our environment?

• How will AI and robotics impact foreign policy and warfare?

• Is AI an existential threat to human control over the planet?

The video is 15 minutes long and well worth a watch - it gives a good overview on the big important questions we’re facing around AI as well as some good examples of the challenges it’s presenting.

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Mistral closes in on Big AI rivals with new open-weight frontier and small models

This is a huge release from Mistal, 10 open-weight models in total that includes a large frontier model as well as smaller models that can be customised and used on device (i.e. offline).

A lot of Mistral’s business customers are looking for models that are faster and cheaper to use, as well as easier to deploy. They’re also less worried about standard benchmark comparisons as they think that the value for businesses is when they customise their models and rate them against their own internal benchmarks.

Their new large frontier model, Mistral Large 3, has both multimodal and multilingual capabilities and has a context window of 256,000 tokens. It’s suitable for powering document analysis, coding, content creation, AI assistants, and workflow automation.

Mistral are leading the way for AI research in the EU and its great to see this release from them.

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Runway says its new text-to-video AI generator has ‘unprecedented’ accuracy

There’s been some really impressive progress made on text-to-video models this year and Runway themselves only released their Gen-4 model back in April. Since then we’ve also had Veo 3 (May) and Veo 3.1 (Oct) from Google, and Sora 2 (Oct) from OpenAI.

I think we’re now in the territory we were in with text-to-image models around 18 months ago where most of them are now ‘good enough’ and are able to generate mostly realistic and convincing content. They’re incredibly powerful tools that should be used responsibly, but I think we’ll see a lot of creative uses of them next year start to hit the mainstream.

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Web 4.0

• Amazon’s AI chatbot Rufus drove sales on Black Friday

• ChatGPT referrals to retailers’ apps increased 28% year-over-year, says report

• ChatGPT’s user growth has slowed, report finds

• Ads Might Finally Be Coming to ChatGPT

• Google tests merging AI Overviews with AI Mode

• Opera rolls out Gemini-powered AI features across its Neon, One, and GX browsers

• OpenAI slammed for app suggestions that looked like ads

AI Ethics News

• AI chatbots can be wooed into crimes with poetry

• Meta strikes AI licensing deals with CNN, Fox News, and USA Today

• The New York Times sues Perplexity for producing ‘verbatim’ copies of its work

• ‘The biggest decision yet’ - Allowing AI to train itself

Long Reads

• Stratechery - Google, NVIDIA, and OpenAI

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson