Matthias Bastian

Dec 22, 2025

OpenAI has reportedly made major strides in improving the profitability of its AI services. The company's compute margin—the share of revenue left after paying for server costs from paying users—jumped from around 35 percent in January 2024 to roughly 70 percent by October 2025, according to internal financial data obtained by The Information. For comparison, Anthropic is expected to reach 53 percent by year's end.

OpenAI achieved these gains by cutting rental costs for computing power, optimizing its models, and launching a pricier subscription tier. Still, the company has a long road ahead before reaching profitability. CEO Sam Altman continues to plan major investments in additional computing power while pursuing further circular business arrangements.

OpenAI is reportedly working on a funding round of up to 100 billion dollars.

Comment Source: The Information

Matthias Bastian

Dec 21, 2025

AI in practice

Kling 2.6 adds voice control and motion upgrades as AI video tools race toward realism

Matthias Bastian

Dec 21, 2025

Short News

Nvidia has released a new base model for gaming agents. NitroGen is an open vision action model trained on 40,000 hours of gameplay videos from more than 1,000 games. The researchers tapped into a previously overlooked resource: YouTube and Twitch videos with visible controller overlays. Using template matching and a fine-tuned SegFormer model, they extracted player inputs directly from these recordings.

NitroGen builds on Nvidia's GR00T N1.5 robotics model. According to the researchers, it's the first model to demonstrate that robotics foundation models can work as universal agents across virtual environments with different physics engines and visual styles. The model handles various genres—action RPGs, platformers, roguelikes, and more. When dropped into unfamiliar games, it achieves up to 52 percent better success rates than models trained from scratch.

The team, which includes researchers from Nvidia, Stanford, Caltech, and other universities, has made the dataset, model weights, paper, and code publicly available.

Comment Source: via Jim Fan

Matthias Bastian

Dec 21, 2025

Short News

Alibaba's AI unit Qwen has released a new image editing model that breaks down photos into separate, editable components. Qwen-Image-Layered splits images into multiple individual layers with transparent backgrounds (RGBA layers), letting users edit each layer independently without affecting the rest of the image.

The model handles straightforward edits like resizing, repositioning, and recoloring individual elements. Users can swap out backgrounds, replace people, modify text, or delete, move, and enlarge objects. Images can be split into either 3 or 8 layers, and the process is repeatable - each layer can be broken down into additional layers as needed. The Qwen team describes this approach as a bridge between standard images and structured, editable representations.

The Qwen team has published the code on GitHub, with models available on Hugging Face and ModelScope. More details are available in the blog post and technical report. For hands-on testing, demos are available on Hugging Face and ModelScope.

Comment Source: Blog

Matthias Bastian

Dec 21, 2025

Short News

AI research organization METR has released new benchmark results for Claude Opus 4.5. Anthropic's latest model achieved a 50 percent time horizon of roughly 4 hours and 49 minutes—the highest score ever recorded. The time horizon measures how long a task can be while still being solved by an AI model at a given success rate (in this case, 50 percent).

The gap between difficulty levels is big. At the 80 percent success rate, the time horizon drops to just 27 minutes, about the same as older models, so Opus 4.5 mainly shines on longer tasks. The theoretical upper limit of over 20 hours is likely noise from limited test data, METR says.

Like any benchmark, the METR test has its limits, most notably, it only covers 14 samples. A detailed breakdown by Shashwat Goel of the weaknesses is here.

Comment Source: METR

Matthias Bastian

Dec 21, 2025

THE DECODER

Some notes on what's new

Hey guys, you’ve probably noticed we’ve changed a thing or two about this website. If you don’t like it yet, give it a chance, it might grow on you.

Two things are important: First, a stronger focus to let you just scroll through the main feed and still grasp the most relevant information. Second, with that comes a return to more blog-style publishing overall. We’ve also added a system we call “Context on Demand”.

Read full article

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Matthias Bastian

Dec 20, 2025

Short News

OpenAI now lets users customize how ChatGPT communicates. The new "Personalization" settings include options for adjusting warmth, enthusiasm, and formatting preferences like headings, lists, and emojis. Each setting can be toggled to "More" or "Less." Users can also pick a base style - like "efficient" for shorter, more direct responses.

OpenAI says these settings only affect the chatbot's tone and style, not its actual capabilities. The company notes that the new options likely work as an extension of the custom instructions feature available in the same settings window.

Comment Source: OpenAI

Matthias Bastian

Dec 18, 2025

AI in practice

Anthropic is releasing "Agent Skills" as an open standard at agentskills.io. The idea is to make these skills interoperable across different platforms, meaning a capability that works in Claude should function just as well in other AI systems. Anthropic likens this strategy to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and notes that it is already working with ecosystem partners on the project. OpenAI already adopted skills.

The company is also upgrading how skills function within Claude. These skills are basically repeatable workflows that customize the AI assistant for specific jobs. Administrators on Team and Enterprise plans can now manage skills from a central hub and push them to every user in their organization, though individuals still have the option to turn them off.

Creating these skills has also gotten easier: users just describe what they need, and Claude helps configure it. Anthropic has also launched a directory of partner skills from companies like Notion, Canva, Figma, and Atlassian at claude.com/connectors. Developers can find technical documentation at platform.claude.com/docs, and skills are now live across Claude apps, Claude Code, and the developer API.

Comment Source: Agentskills | Anthropic

Matthias Bastian

Dec 18, 2025

AI research

GPT-5.2 tops OpenAI's new FrontierScience test but struggles with real research problems

Matthias Bastian

Dec 18, 2025

AI and society

OpenAI is in early talks with investors about a massive funding round that could push the company's valuation to around $750 billion, according to The Information. The company could raise tens of billions of dollars, potentially as much as $100 billion.

The discussions are still in their early stages, and nothing is set in stone. At this valuation, the deal would mark a 50 percent jump from OpenAI's last share sale in October.

Amazon is also in talks to invest $10 billion or more. It's the kind of circular AI deal that's become common: Amazon hands OpenAI cash, and OpenAI turns around and spends it on Amazon's chips and cloud services.

According to The Information, OpenAI has reached an annualized revenue run rate of $19 billion, keeping the company on pace to hit its $20 billion target by year's end. The company is projecting $30 billion in revenue for 2026, rising to around $200 billion by 2030. But these ambitious growth targets come with an enormous cash burn of roughly $26 billion for this year and next.

Comment Source: The Information