Matthias Bastian

Jan 5, 2026

OpenAI is losing yet another senior researcher: Jerry Tworek is out after nearly seven years at the company. Tworek shared the news in a message to his team. He was a key player in building GPT-4, ChatGPT, and OpenAI's first AI coding models, while also helping push new scaling boundaries. Most recently, he ran the "Reasoning Models" team, working on AI systems that can handle complex logical reasoning. He was part of the core group behind the o1 and o3 models, the foundation for much of OpenAI's recent AI progress.

Tworek says he wants "to try and explore types of research that are hard to do at OpenAI." That sounds like a not-so-subtle dig at CEO Sam Altman's relentless focus on products and revenue, which has reportedly been causing tension among researchers. No word yet on where Tworek is headed next.

Comment Source: Tworek via X

Matthias Bastian

Jan 5, 2026

Short News

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) from Abu Dhabi has released Falcon H1R 7B, a compact reasoning language model with 7 billion parameters. TII says the model matches the performance of competitors two to seven times larger across various benchmarks, though as always, benchmark scores only loosely correlate with real-world performance, especially for smaller models. Falcon H1R 7B uses a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, which lets it process data faster than comparable models.

Falcon H1R 7B scores 49.5 percent across four benchmarks, outperforming larger models like Qwen3 32B (46.2 percent) and Nemotron H 47B Reasoning (43.5 percent). | Image: Technology Innovation Institute (TII)

The model is available as a complete checkpoint and quantized version on Hugging Face, along with a demo. TII released it under the Falcon LLM license, which allows free use, reproduction, modification, distribution, and commercial use. Users must follow the Acceptable Use Policy, which TII can update at any time.

Comment Source: Website | Github Blog

Matthias Bastian

Jan 5, 2026

Short News

Almost 90 percent of ChatGPT's roughly 900 million weekly users live outside the USA and Canada, according to The Information, citing data from tracking platform Sensor Tower. This creates a challenge for OpenAI's planned advertising business, since international users generate far less revenue. At Pinterest, for example, the average revenue per user in the USA is $7.64, compared to just 21 cents elsewhere.

India and Brazil rank among the largest ChatGPT markets alongside the USA, Japan, and France. Only about five percent of users pay for subscriptions. For emerging markets like India, OpenAI offers the cheaper "ChatGPT Go" plan at around $5 per month.

OpenAI plans to generate roughly $110 billion from free users by 2030, with advertising likely playing a major role. The company needs this aggressive revenue growth to meet its data center commitments.

Comment Source: The Information

Matthias Bastian

Jan 5, 2026

AI in practice

Microsoft CEO Nadella argues AI's real problem isn't capability but that people haven't learned to use it yet

Matthias Bastian

Jan 4, 2026

AI and society

NYU professor fights AI cheating with AI-powered oral exams that cost 42 cents per student

Matthias Bastian

Jan 4, 2026

Short News

"The exponential continues until it doesn't," says Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, quoting her colleagues. At Anthropic, the team believed every year that this pace couldn't possibly keep up, and yet it did, Amodei says in an interview with CNBC TV. But that's not guaranteed, she adds. Anthropic doesn't know the future either and could be wrong about this assumption.

Economically, things get more complicated, Amodei says (from 15:56). Even if the models keep improving, rolling them out in companies can stall for "human reasons": change management takes time, procurement processes move slowly, and specific use cases often remain unclear. The key question for whether AI is in a bubble comes down to whether the economy can absorb the technology as fast as it's advancing, she suggests.

Comment Source: CNBC via YouTube

Matthias Bastian

Jan 4, 2026

Short News

Tech companies building AI data centers are facing growing opposition from US communities, the Los Angeles Times reports. Between April and June, 20 projects worth $98 billion were blocked or delayed across eleven states: two-thirds of all projects it is tracking, according to Data Center Watch. Residents cite rising electricity costs, water consumption, noise, and loss of farmland.

Real estate firms are now considering selling land over approval concerns. Matthews, North Carolina Mayor John Higdon told the LA Times that politicians backing these projects risk getting voted out. In Indiana alone, more than a dozen projects failed to get permits, says activist Bryce Gustafson. Industry representatives like Dan Diorio from the Data Center Coalition are pushing for better community outreach.

Meanwhile, AI companies have massive expansion plans. Google wants to increase computing capacity 1,000-fold within five years, and OpenAI is pursuing its Stargate project. Beyond local resistance, there's another problem: the US power grid can't keep up.

Comment Source: LA Times

Matthias Bastian

Jan 4, 2026

Update

AI in practice

Google engineer says Claude Code built in one hour what her team spent a year on

A senior Google engineer publicly praises Anthropic’s Claude Code: the tool built in one hour what her team spent a year developing. The quality and efficiency gains exceed anything anyone could have imagined, she says. Plus: Claude Code’s creator shares his best workflow tips.

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Matthias Bastian

Jan 3, 2026

AI in practice

"You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do" says LeCun as he exits Meta for his own startup

Matthias Bastian

Jan 3, 2026

Short News

OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman has donated $25 million to MAGA Inc., Donald Trump's super PAC, according to a Bloomberg report citing FEC filings. The donation is part of $102 million MAGA Inc. raised in the second half of 2025, bringing its war chest to $294 million by year's end. Three donors accounted for over half: Brockman, crypto exchange Crypto.com ($20 million), and private equity investor Konstantin Sokolov ($11 million).

Brockman hasn't commented on his support for Trump. But OpenAI and the AI industry stand to benefit from the relaxed regulations the Trump administration has promised, including plans to regulate AI at the federal level rather than leaving it to individual states. Large donors like Brockman may also be hoping to gain access to the administration or influence policy decisions. Brockman is also a member of "Leading the Future," a political network pushing back against stricter AI legislation.

Comment Source: Bloomberg