Weekend Warp: December 7, 2025
Top Big AI and Tech developments every week you must know
Welcome to ‘Dharma of AI’, By Jaspreet Bindra—The Tech Whisperer.
Ok, Sam Altman and OpenAI are back to headline Weekend Warp again. But, not in the way Altman would prefer.
Stung by the nanobanana-powered strike back by Google, and a focused profit-led strategy by Anthropic, Sam Altman declared a Code Red at OpenAI (Read more). In a memo to his team on Monday, he said “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT,” acknowledging that more work was needed to enhance ChatGPT’s speed, reliability and personalization features. To focus on this “code red” effort, OpenAI will be delaying work on advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse (Read More). The company is also planning daily calls among those responsible for improving ChatGPT—a level of urgency that speaks volumes about the competitive heat OpenAI is feeling. Ironically, Google had declared a Code Red earlier, when even Sergey Brin came back to literally code his company out of AI wilderness. I have always maintained that the AI war is Google’s to lose (see my Mint article on that). They are the only full stack play out there - from NVIDIA-threatening chips, the best AI lab with Deepmind, the best engineers led by Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis, dominating distribution, and, most importantly, the best world data with search, YouTube and everything else. They own the Internet, and it is now up to them to ‘own’ AI too.
One of the ways OpenAI is coming back is through a flurry of announcements. If GPT-5 was code-named Strawberry, the next one, it seems, is called Garlic. According to The Information, OpenAI is working on a new model codenamed “Garlic” (Read more). The breakthrough? OpenAI has apparently figured out how to infuse a smaller model with the same amount of knowledge it could previously only get from developing a much larger model. So less GPUs, less cost—a critical advantage when you’re burning through capital at OpenAI’s rate. Even more urgent: GPT-5.2 is being fast-tracked to launch as early as December 9 (More here)—next week!—originally scheduled for mid-December but pulled forward to counter Google’s momentum. The model wars are heating up, and the release cadence is getting frantic!
Another announcement is where Jony Ive and Sam Altman say they finally have an AI hardware prototype. For context: In May 2025, OpenAI acquired Ive’s design startup “io” for $6.4 billion (Read more), bringing the legendary Apple designer (who created the iPhone, iPod, and iPad) on board to reimagine what an AI-first device could be. The partnership was shrouded in mystery until last week’s reveal at the Emerson Collective Demo Day. The Verge reports (more here) that “little has been revealed so far about the OpenAI device in development, but it’s rumored to be screen-free and roughly the size of a smartphone.” Altman described the design as “simple and beautiful and playful,” (Read More). It would still take about two years more to come out though, so it’s a while before we get our itchy hands on it.
Bonus: Anthropic meanwhile is sitting pretty. Its founder Dario Amodei sneakily suggested at the NYT DealBook Summit that “Anthropic does not need a Code Red.” (Read more). This is because they are super focused on GenAI for the Enterprise, and spending less while creating more. “We have a little bit of a privileged position where we can just keep growing and just keep developing our models,” Amodei said (read here), adding that Anthropic has issued no “code reds.” Investors are warming up to this disciplined strategy more than OpenAI’s random walks, and it’s possible that Anthropic will IPO sooner than OpenAI, with valuations projected to exceed $300 billion. (More here)
Double Bonus: Perplexity created its own news this week, with founder Aravind Srinivas announcing that the football GOAT Cristiano Ronaldo is an investor and the face of Perplexity. Ronaldo posted on X (Check here) saying he was “proud” to announce his investment, describing curiosity as “a requirement for greatness.” Srinivas welcomed the partnership on Instagram (More here), calling it an “elite collab” and praising Ronaldo as “the GOAT—he’s relentless and constantly researching the latest techniques.” The partnership includes launching the “Ronaldo Hub”—a custom AI assistant featuring unseen images from Ronaldo’s personal archive, career statistics, interactive goal replays, and curated Q&A about his two-decade career. With Ronaldo’s millions of social media followers, this gives Perplexity massive distribution in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. (Side snarky comment: Perplexity, by the way, still hedges on who is the GOAT - Ronaldo or Messi. If Srinivas was Musk, he would have fixed that algorithm by now 😉)
In this week’s AI Tool of the Week, we look at a technology designed for one of the biggest challenges of the AI era: knowing what is real and what is generated. Google DeepMind’s SynthID adds invisible watermarks to AI-created images, giving users a way to verify origin and maintain trust in visual content.