Just last October, Andrej Karpathy dismissed AI agents: “They just don’t work.” Now he says 80 percent of his coding is agent-based and calls it the “biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades.” A typically measured voice is joining the agent coding hype, but with some warnings attached.
OpenAI is charging around $60 per 1,000 impressions for its initial ChatGPT ads, far above typical online advertising rates in the low single digits and closer to what advertisers pay for premium TV spots like NFL games, according to The Information. The ads show up below ChatGPT responses in the free and lower-cost "Go" tiers.
OpenAI is also reportedly charging per impression rather than per click. Advertisers typically prefer click-based billing because it's easier to measure results. The decision to go with impressions likely reflects how AI chatbot users behave differently than traditional search users: they click on external links far less often. Perplexity uses the same approach, also charging per 1,000 impressions.
The move toward advertising—at premium prices and in a format that's less appealing to advertisers—suggests OpenAI needs to ramp up revenue quickly to justify its high valuation to investors. Sam Altman previously called ChatGPT advertising a last resort and a potential dystopia.
Microsoft has unveiled its new AI inference chip, Maia 200. Built specifically for inference workloads, the chip delivers 30 percent better performance per dollar than current-generation chips in Microsoft's data centers, the company claims. It's manufactured using TSMC's 3-nanometer process, packs over 140 billion transistors, and features 216 GB of high-speed memory.
According to Microsoft, the Maia 200 is now the most powerful in-house chip among major cloud providers. The company claims it delivers three times the FP4 performance of Amazon's Trainium 3 while also outperforming Google's TPU v7 in FP8 calculations—though independent benchmarks have yet to verify these figures.
Microsoft says the chip already powers OpenAI's GPT 5.2 models and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Developers interested in trying it out can sign up for a preview of the Maia SDK. The Maia 200 is currently available in Microsoft's Iowa data center, with Arizona coming next. More technical details about the chip are available here.
The story sounds simple: ChatGPT launched, jobs in AI-exposed fields disappeared. But a new study shows the decline started months before the chatbot arrived. The researchers argue we shouldn’t pin all labor market problems on AI.
Data from Sensor Tower and Wells Fargo Securities suggests AI coding tools are flooding the iOS App Store. According to a16z, new iOS apps jumped 60 percent in December 2025 year-over-year, with 24 percent growth across the full twelve months. The three years prior, new app numbers stayed essentially flat.
The analysis ties the surge to "agentic coding," AI-powered tools that let users build apps with minimal coding experience. a16z draws a parallel to 2008, when Apple released the iPhone SDK and the App Store launched with 500 apps but hit one million downloads within a weekend.
The analysis doesn't prove vibe coding is causing the increase; the correlation could be coincidental. Still, it makes intuitive sense: building an app has become much easier, meaning more people can now ship their ideas to the App Store.
Meta is cutting off access to AI characters for teenagers around the globe. Starting in the "coming weeks," teens won't be able to use AI characters in Meta's apps until a revised version is ready. The ban applies to all users who entered a teenage birth date, as well as people who claim to be adults but are flagged as minors by Meta's age recognition technology.
Meta's AI Assistant will stay available for minors with age-appropriate protections, the company says. Meta is also working on new tools that will give parents more visibility and control over how their kids use AI features. Once those tools are ready, they'll apply to the updated version of AI characters.
Meta had already responded to reports about problematic chatbot interactions with minors in the summer of 2025. An internal document revealed that Meta's AI chatbots were allowed to have romantic or "sensual" conversations with minors under the company's guidelines. Following the disclosure, Meta announced that chatbots would no longer be permitted to discuss sensitive topics with teenagers.
OpenAI has a new math champion. GPT-5.2 Pro just set a record on the notoriously difficult FrontierMath benchmark, according to testing by Epoch AI. The model hit 31 percent on the hardest tier (Tier 4) - a major leap from Gemini 3 Pro's previous best of 19 percent. Epoch AI ran the tests manually through the ChatGPT website because of API issues.
GPT-5.2 Pro cracked 15 of 48 tasks, including four problems no model had solved before. Several mathematicians gave the solutions mostly positive reviews, though some criticized the lack of precision in certain explanations.
The benchmark results line up with recent reports about AI models—particularly GPT-5-Thinking and -Pro—proving genuinely useful for tackling mathematical problems. GPT-5 has reportedly solved Erdős problems on its own and helped researchers work through others. Still, renowned mathematician Terence Tao cautions against drawing premature conclusions.
