Three Years of ChatGPT, Two New Video Models, One Major Fundraising Round, and More!
This Week in AI Newsletter 12/1/2025
Germany’s Black Forest Labs raised a $300M Series B, boosting its valuation to $3.25B. The foundation model company, is doubling down on research and development. Its image models are already used by Adobe, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel. More here.
Three years ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT: “We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way.” Five days later it surpassed 1 million users; today it sees around 800 million weekly active users. More here.
OpenAI has taken an ownership stake in Josh Kushner’s Thrive Holdings, which buys and modernizes accounting and IT services companies. The partnership is meant to bring advanced AI directly into these businesses’ day-to-day operations rather than applying it from the outside. This partnership reflects the growing trend of firms consolidating services businesses and integrating technology and AI into their operations like Long Lake Management Holdings. More here.
New York now requires online stores to tell customers when an algorithm uses their personal data to set a specific price. There are growing concerns that retailers could exploit personal data to inflate prices for customers known to spend more. More here.
DeepSeek released two new reasoning models designed for agentic workflows, DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale. They show modest gains over comparable models on reasoning and agent-focused benchmarks, outperforming all competitors on AIME 2025 and HMMT 2025. However, they still trail frontier models in most other categories. More here.
Two New Video Models!
RunwayAI released Runway Gen 4.5 (AKA Whisper Thunder) which outperformed all models including VEO 3 and Sora 2 Pro on Text to Video leaderboards. The frontier model will be rolled out this week, stay tuned for more insights! More here.
Kling AI launched Kling 01, a new model that accepts text, images, and videos as inputs. Key features include prompt-based video editing, full 360-degree scene consistency, and motion control using reference videos. More here.
ChatGPT rolled out ads directly in the chat interface. Tibor Blaho on X found code that references ads features in ChatGPT’s Android app 1.2025.329 beta. Yuchen Jin found an ad for peloton in his chat (Image below). More here.
The New York Times alleged that venture capitalist David Sacks is crafting AI policies that benefit his personal holdings, saying that he remains an active investor while serving as the administration’s AI & Crypto Czar. Sacks pushes back, claiming that if the government excluded everyone with financial conflicts, the country would be run by bureaucrats with no real-world experience. More here.