20: The open revolution
Hey, it’s Marc.
OpenAI launches GPT-5, but its debut hit a few bumps: from a routing glitch that made it seem “dumber” than GPT-4o, to a viral “chart crime” during the live demo. Sam Altman says fixes are rolling out, Plus users may get 4o back, and rate limits are doubling. Meanwhile, Microsoft rolls out GPT-5 across Copilot, GitHub, and Azure for smarter AI.
The takeaway: GPT-5’s rocky start won’t slow its adoption with Microsoft baking it into core products.
Top AI signals this week:
Google Finance adds AI, better charts, real-time data, and news
Hugging Face introduces AI sheets
Grok 4 is free worldwide
Apple Intelligence will switch from GPT-4o to GPT-5 next month
Google launches Jules for everyone
Universal Pictures warns and threatens lawsuits over AI training on films
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Top Boardroom Reads This Week
The economics of superintelligence (The Economist)
The Path to Medical Superintelligence (Microsoft)
GPT-5 Hands-On: Welcome to the Stone Age (Latent Space)
Mag 7 AI Infrastructure Spend bending Business Models (Reset to Zero)
The Rise of the Agentic Workforce (Prosus)
Guided Learning in Gemini: From answers to understanding (Google)
Power Moves
OpenAI Revives GPT-4o, But Only for Paying Users
OpenAI is bringing GPT-4o back for ChatGPT Plus users after GPT-5’s debut drew backlash from users missing 4's “warmer” personality and creative capabilities. Sam Altman and the team also held a Reddit AMA on Friday after GPT-5 backlash. While GPT-5 benchmarks higher in reasoning, many report it’s slower, less creative, and too “neutral” for tasks like marketing copy, customer service scripting, or ideation. [BLOG]
So what? GPT-5 is OpenAI’s smartest, fastest, most useful model yet. Its launch led to many businesses losing key AI capabilities overnight. AI strategy needs redundancy. It means: multiple models, providers, and fallbacks, baked in before vendor updates disrupt workflows.
Google DeepMind’s Genie 3
Google DeepMind dropped Genie 3, an AI “world model” that converts text prompts into fully interactive 3D environments—navigable in real time at 24 FPS and consistent for several minutes. Its “promptable world events” mean you can instantly change weather, inject hazards, or recreate historical scenarios—no coding required. [BLOG]
So what? It’s a $300B+ immersive economy accelerator. It brings speed to insights with quick physical mockups, optimising the design cycles. It offers a faster, cheaper, and more immersive solution for enterprises in simulation-driven work.
Spotlight: OpenAI goes open-source
For the first time since GPT-2, OpenAI have released two powerful open-weight models (gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b) that anyone can download, run locally, and customise. [BLOG]
Why it matters: For years, high-performing AI was locked behind APIs and vendor ecosystems. That’s fine for rapid deployment, but it limits customisation, adds recurring costs, and keeps businesses dependent on a single provider’s roadmap.
The performance is legitimate. These models match or beat OpenAI's proprietary o3-mini and o4-mini on key benchmarks, with the 120B model running on a single 80GB GPU and the 20B model needing just 16GB of RAM.
Customizable: Fine-tune models on your own data without vendor lock-in.
Private: Deploy on-prem or in your own cloud to meet strict compliance rules.
Cost-Efficient: Avoid expensive API calls; optimise performance for your own workloads.
The timing is strategic. This comes right as the AI talent war intensifies and China's DeepSeek has proven that open, efficient models can challenge Silicon Valley's closed approach.
Open-weight models like GPT-oss are part of a broader AI unbundling trend. Proprietary APIs will remain attractive for turnkey features and multimodal capabilities, but open weights give enterprises a new layer of control, security, and cost optimisation.
This release creates the first viable alternative to the "rent AI from big tech" model. Businesses can now own their AI stack, customise it deeply, and avoid ongoing fees. That's a fundamental shift from software-as-a-service back to owned software, but for cutting-edge AI.
More on GPT-oss:
Top AI Vendors This Week
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That’s all for today.
Thanks,
Marc & Team