Model Releases & Upgrades

• OpenAI has released GPT-5.1, featuring two new modes: GPT-5.1 Instant (warmer, more conversational) and GPT-5.1 Thinking (quicker on simple tasks, more persistent on complex ones). The update introduces adaptive reasoning, allowing the model to take extra time for difficult questions.
• Users can now customize their experience with eight personality presets (Default, Professional, Friendly, Candid, Quirky, Efficient, Nerdy, and Cynical) and settings for warmth, conciseness, and emoji usage.
• The update is rolling out first to paid users, with free and logged-out users to follow in the coming weeks.

The Rise of World Models

• AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs has launched Marble, a commercial world model that generates persistent and editable 3D environments from text, images, videos, or sketches. This marks a significant push towards AI with "spatial intelligence"—an understanding of physics, causality, and 3D space.
• Similarly, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) launched PAN, a world model designed for generality that separates reasoning from perception to stay grounded in real-world physics.
• Unlike video generation models that render appearance, world models aim to simulate reality, maintaining an internal state and predicting how environments evolve in response to actions. Potential applications include robotics simulation, game development, VFX, and autonomous vehicle training.

Industry & Corporate Developments

• Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment in U.S. AI infrastructure, building custom data centers in Texas and New York. The company is also on track for profitability by 2028, significantly faster than OpenAI, which projects $74 billion in losses that same year.
• SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia to fund further investments in AI, with a particular focus on OpenAI and its infrastructure.
• Meta's Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, is reportedly preparing to leave the company to launch a new startup focused on his JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture) vision, an alternative to large language models.
• ElevenLabs launched its Iconic Voice Marketplace, offering licensed AI-generated voices from celebrities and historical figures, including Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine.

Legal, Privacy & Ethical Concerns

• A German court ruled that OpenAI's ChatGPT violated copyright law by training on protected song lyrics, in a landmark European judgment.
• Google is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging its Gemini AI was secretly activated across Gmail, Chat, and Meet without user consent, violating privacy laws.
• OpenAI is fighting a court order to provide 20 million anonymized ChatGPT conversations to The New York Times for its copyright lawsuit, citing an "invasion of user privacy."
• Chinese AI company DeepSeek called for all AI labs to become "whistleblowers" and publicly disclose which human jobs their models are expected to eliminate.

Other Noteworthy News

• OpenAI is internally testing Group Chats for ChatGPT, a feature allowing multiple users to collaborate with the AI in a shared thread, with a potential rollout in December.
• Researchers at Japan’s NTT Communication Science Laboratories developed a "mind captioning" system that uses fMRI scans and an LLM to generate text descriptions of what a person is seeing.
• An AI-generated country song titled 'Walk My Walk' by the artist Breaking Rust reached No. 1 on a Billboard chart.