OpenAI launched GPT Image 1.5, delivering 4x faster image generation and improved editing accuracy for ChatGPT and API users worldwide. PCWorld reports the update includes a new creative studio mode with an image tab for enhanced editing capabilities and filter applications. The accelerated release aims to compete with Google's recent AI advancements while addressing consistency issues in consecutive image adjustments. OpenAI has launched its newest image model GPT Image 1.5, which offers up to 4 times faster image generation, more accurate image editing, and better compliance with user instructions. One of the more noticeable improvements is that the new version should provide more consistent results between consecutive edits. For example, when adjusting lighting, facial expressions, or color tone on a specific image, GPT Image should no longer make drastic unwanted changes--something many AI image tools have difficulty with.

The holy grail for scientists is to focus on their research to enhance and produce scientific discoveries while offloading time-consuming tasks. So-called artificial intelligence (AI) co-scientists are helping to make this possible. These collaborative AI systems are designed to assist human researchers by accelerating scientific discovery, enhancing collaboration, analyzing data, and going beyond human intuition. An AI co-scientist performs various scientific tasks, especially in areas like hypothesis generation, experimental design, verification, and literature review. It uses the results to learn to improve its ability to generate and refine hypotheses.

W hen the billionaire chief executive of AI chipmaker Nvidia threw a party in central London for Donald Trump's state visit in September, the power imbalance between Silicon Valley and British politicians was vividly exposed. Jensen Huang hastened to the stage after meetings at Chequers and rallied his hundreds of guests to cheer on the power of AI. In front of a huge Nvidia logo, he urged the venture capitalists before him to herald "a new industrial revolution", announced billions of pounds in AI investments and, like Willy Wonka handing out golden tickets, singled out some lucky recipients in the room. "If you want to get rich, this is where you want to be," he declared. But his biggest party trick was a surprise guest waiting in the wings.

Google's Gemini 3 Flash model outperforms GPT-5.2 in some benchmarks Gemini 3 Flash is now rolling out to the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. Almost exactly a month after the debut of Gemini 3 Pro in November, Google has begun rolling out the more efficient Flash version of its latest AI model. According to the company, the new system offers similar pro-grade reasoning performance as its flagship model at a fraction of the cost, making it ideal for everyday use. In benchmarks, the new system performed significantly better than Google's previous generation models, including Gemini 2.5 Pro. More notably, in Google's testing it managed to trade blows with GPT-5.2, the model OpenAI rushed out to counter Gemini 3 Pro.

OpenAI is planning to spend $1.4tn on AI infrastructure over the next eight years. OpenAI is planning to spend $1.4tn on AI infrastructure over the next eight years. Amazon is in talks to invest more than $10bn (£7.5bn) in OpenAI, in the latest funding deal being struck by the startup behind ChatGPT . If it goes ahead, the market valuation of OpenAI could rise above $500bn, according to The Information, a tech news site that revealed the negotiations . Amazon, which is best known as an online retailer, is also the world's largest datacentre provider and its investment would help OpenAI pay for its commitments to rent capacity from cloud computing companies - including Amazon .

This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, sometimes fooling us against our better judgment. The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, gauges the point at which a text-generating machine can fool a human into thinking it's not a robot. ChatGPT passed that benchmark earlier this year, inaugurating a new technological era, though not necessarily one of superhuman intelligence . More recently, however, artificial intelligence passed another threshold, a kind of Turing test for the eye: the images and videos that A.I. can produce are now sometimes indistinguishable from real ones. As new, image-friendly models were trained, refined, and released by companies including OpenAI, Meta, and Google, the online public gained the ability to instantly generate realistic A.I. content on any theme they could imagine, from superhero fan art and cute animals to scenes of violence and war.

OpenAI would also rent more data center capacity from Amazon. Amazon is in discussions with OpenAI to invest $10 billion in the company while supplying more of its AI chips and cloud computing services, according to . The deal would push OpenAI's valuation over $500 billion but is likely to raise more questions about the company's circular investment agreements involving chips and data centers. The two companies are also in talks about the possibility of OpenAI helping Amazon with its online marketplace, similar to deals it has made with Etsy, Shopify and Instacart. However, any agreement still wouldn't allow Amazon to market OpenAI's most advanced models on its developer cloud platform, as Microsoft holds the exclusive rights to those until the 2030s.

Sparse longitudinal (SL) textual data arises when individuals generate text repeatedly over time (e.g., customer reviews, occasional social media posts, electronic medical records across visits), but the frequency and timing of observations vary across individuals. These complex textual data sets have immense potential to inform future policy and targeted recommendations. However, because SL text data lack dedicated methods and are noisy, heterogeneous, and prone to anomalies, detecting and inferring key patterns is challenging. We introduce LLmFPCA-detect, a flexible framework that pairs LLM-based text embeddings with functional data analysis to detect clusters and infer anomalies in large SL text datasets. First, LLmFPCA-detect embeds each piece of text into an application-specific numeric space using LLM prompts. Sparse multivariate functional principal component analysis (mFPCA) conducted in the numeric space forms the workhorse to recover primary population characteristics, and produces subject-level scores which, together with baseline static covariates, facilitate data segmentation, unsupervised anomaly detection and inference, and enable other downstream tasks. In particular, we leverage LLMs to perform dynamic keyword profiling guided by the data segments and anomalies discovered by LLmFPCA-detect, and we show that cluster-specific functional PC scores from LLmFPCA-detect, used as features in existing pipelines, help boost prediction performance. We support the stability of LLmFPCA-detect with experiments and evaluate it on two different applications using public datasets, Amazon customer-review trajectories, and Wikipedia talk-page comment streams, demonstrating utility across domains and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .

Don't expect the next Clair Obscur, though. Google's at it again, once more insisting that AI is something people need or want more of in their lives. The latest move comes from YouTube Gaming, which announced an open beta for a project called Playables Builder. This allows select YouTube Creators to use a prototype web app built using Gemini 3 to make bite-sized games, no coding required. YouTube is launching a closed Beta test for Playables Builder, a prototype web app built using Gemini 3 where users create games with short text, video or image prompts. YouTube was testing the addition of small-scale games to its desktop and mobile platforms back in 2023, then added multiplayer capability to Playables last year.