Good day, expensive readers. Completely happy belated Thanksgiving and Black Friday!

This yr has felt like dwelling inside a everlasting DevDay. Each week, some lab drops a brand new mannequin, a brand new agent framework, or a brand new “this modifications every part” demo. It’s overwhelming. Nevertheless it’s additionally the primary yr I’ve felt like AI is lastly diversifying — not only one or two frontier fashions within the cloud, however a complete ecosystem: open and closed, big and tiny, Western and Chinese language, cloud and native.

So for this Thanksgiving version, right here’s what I’m genuinely grateful for in AI in 2025 — the releases that really feel like they’ll matter in 12–24 months, not simply throughout this week’s hype cycle.

1. OpenAI saved delivery sturdy: GPT-5, GPT-5.1, Atlas, Sora 2 and open weights

As the corporate that undeniably birthed the "generative AI" period with its viral hit product ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI arguably had among the many hardest duties of any AI firm in 2025: proceed its development trajectory at the same time as well-funded opponents like Google with its Gemini fashions and different startups like Anthropic fielded their very own extremely aggressive choices.

Fortunately, OpenAI rose to the problem after which some. Its headline act was GPT-5, unveiled in August as the following frontier reasoning mannequin, adopted in November by GPT-5.1 with new Prompt and Considering variants that dynamically regulate how a lot “pondering time” they spend per activity.

In observe, GPT-5’s launch was bumpy — VentureBeat documented early math and coding failures and a cooler-than-expected neighborhood response in “OpenAI’s GPT-5 rollout is not going smoothly," nevertheless it shortly course corrected primarily based on consumer suggestions and, as a each day consumer of this mannequin, I'm personally happy with it and impressed with it.

On the similar time, enterprises truly utilizing the fashions are reporting stable positive aspects. ZenDesk Global, for instance, says GPT-5-powered agents now resolve more than half of customer tickets, with some prospects seeing 80–90% decision charges. That’s the quiet story: these fashions might not all the time impress the chattering courses on X, however they’re beginning to transfer actual KPIs.

On the tooling facet, OpenAI lastly gave builders a severe AI engineer with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, a brand new coding mannequin that may run lengthy, agentic workflows and is already the default in OpenAI’s Codex surroundings. VentureBeat coated it intimately in “OpenAI debuts GPT-5.1-Codex-Max coding model and it already completed a 24-hour task internally.”

Then there’s ChatGPT Atlas, a full browser with ChatGPT baked into the chrome itself — sidebar summaries, on-page evaluation, and search tightly built-in into common shopping. It’s the clearest signal but that “assistant” and “browser” are on a collision course.

On the media facet, Sora 2 turned the unique Sora video demo right into a full video-and-audio mannequin with higher physics, synchronized sound and dialogue, and extra management over fashion and shot construction, plus a dedicated Sora app with a full fledged social networking element, permitting any consumer to create their own TV network in their pocket.

Lastly — and possibly most symbolically — OpenAI released gpt-oss-120B and gpt-oss-20B, open-weight MoE reasoning fashions beneath an Apache 2.0–fashion license. No matter you consider their high quality (and early open-source customers have been loud about their complaints), that is the primary time since GPT-2 that OpenAI has put severe weights into the general public commons.

2. China’s open-source wave goes mainstream

If 2023–24 was about Llama and Mistral, 2025 belongs to China’s open-weight ecosystem.

A research from MIT and Hugging Face discovered that China now slightly leads the U.S. in global open-model downloads, largely due to DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen household.

Highlights:

• DeepSeek-R1 dropped in January as an open-source reasoning mannequin rivaling OpenAI’s o1, with MIT-licensed weights and a household of distilled smaller fashions. VentureBeat has adopted the story from its launch to its cybersecurity impact to performance-tuned R1 variants.

• Kimi K2 Considering from Moonshot, a “pondering” open-source mannequin that causes step-by-step with instruments, very a lot within the o1/R1 mildew, and is positioned as the best open reasoning model so far in the world.

• Z.ai shipped GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air as “agentic” fashions, open-sourcing base and hybrid reasoning variants on GitHub.

• Baidu’s ERNIE 4.5 household arrived as a completely open-sourced, multimodal MoE suite beneath Apache 2.0, together with a 0.3B dense mannequin and visible “Thinking” variants targeted on charts, STEM, and gear use.

• Alibaba’s Qwen3 line — together with Qwen3-Coder, massive reasoning fashions, and the Qwen3-VL sequence launched over the summer season and fall months of 2025 — continues to set a excessive bar for open weights in coding, translation, and multimodal reasoning, main me to declare this previous summer season as "

  Qwen's summer."

VentureBeat has been monitoring these shifts, together with Chinese language math and reasoning fashions like Light-R1-32B and Weibo’s tiny VibeThinker-1.5B, which beat DeepSeek baselines on shoestring coaching budgets.

In case you care about open ecosystems or on-premise choices, that is the yr China’s open-weight scene stopped being a curiosity and have become a severe various.

3. Small and native fashions develop up

One other factor I’m grateful for: we’re lastly getting good small fashions, not simply toys.

Liquid AI spent 2025 pushing its Liquid Basis Fashions (LFM2) and LFM2-VL vision-language variants, designed from day one for low-latency, device-aware deployments — edge bins, robots, and constrained servers, not simply big clusters. The newer LFM2-VL-3B targets embedded robotics and industrial autonomy, with demos deliberate at ROSCon.

On the big-tech facet, Google’s Gemma 3 line made a powerful case that “tiny” can nonetheless be succesful. Gemma 3 spans from 270M parameters up by means of 27B, all with open weights and multimodal help within the bigger variants.

The standout is Gemma 3 270M, a compact mannequin purpose-built for fine-tuning and structured textual content duties — assume customized formatters, routers, and watchdogs — coated each in Google’s developer weblog and neighborhood discussions in local-LLM circles.

These fashions might by no means development on X, however they’re precisely what you want for privacy-sensitive workloads, offline workflows, thin-client units, and “agent swarms” the place you don’t need each device name hitting an enormous frontier LLM.

4. Meta + Midjourney: aesthetics as a service

One of many stranger twists this yr: Meta partnered with Midjourney as an alternative of merely attempting to beat it.

In August, Meta introduced a deal to license Midjourney’s “aesthetic know-how” — its picture and video technology stack — and combine it into Meta’s future fashions and merchandise, from Fb and Instagram feeds to Meta AI options.

VentureBeat coated the partnership in “Meta is partnering with Midjourney and will license its technology for future models and products,” elevating the plain query: does this sluggish or reshape Midjourney’s personal API roadmap? Nonetheless awaiting a solution there, however sadly, acknowledged plans for an API launch have but to materialize, suggesting that it has.

For creators and types, although, the rapid implication is easy: Midjourney-grade visuals begin to present up in mainstream social instruments as an alternative of being locked away in a Discord bot. That would normalize higher-quality AI artwork for a a lot wider viewers — and drive rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Black Forest Labs to maintain elevating the bar.

5. Google’s Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Professional

Google tried to reply GPT-5 with Gemini 3, billed as its most succesful mannequin but, with higher reasoning, coding, and multimodal understanding, plus a brand new Deep Assume mode for sluggish, exhausting issues.

VentureBeat’s protection, “Google unveils Gemini 3 claiming the lead in math, science, multimodal and agentic AI,” framed it as a direct shot at frontier benchmarks and agentic workflows.

However the shock hit is Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image), Google’s new flagship image generator. It makes a speciality of infographics, diagrams, multi-subject scenes, and multilingual textual content that really renders legibly throughout 2K and 4K resolutions.

On this planet of enterprise AI — the place charts, product schematics, and “clarify this technique visually” photos matter greater than fantasy dragons — that’s an enormous deal.

6. Wild playing cards I’m maintaining a tally of

A number of extra releases I’m grateful for, even when they don’t match neatly into one bucket:

• Black Forest Labs’ Flux.2 picture fashions, which launched simply earlier this week with ambitions to problem each Nano Banana Professional and Midjourney on high quality and management. VentureBeat dug into the main points in “Black Forest Labs launches Flux.2 AI image models to challenge Nano Banana Pro and Midjourney."

• Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, a brand new flagship that goals for cheaper, extra succesful coding and long-horizon activity execution, coated in “Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 is here: Cheaper AI, infinite chats, and coding skills that beat humans."

• A gentle drumbeat of open math/reasoning fashions — from Gentle-R1 to VibeThinker and others — that present you don’t want $100M coaching runs to maneuver the needle.

Final thought (for now)

If 2024 was the yr of “one huge mannequin within the cloud,” 2025 is the yr the map exploded: a number of frontiers on the prime, China taking the lead in open fashions, small and environment friendly techniques maturing quick, and artistic ecosystems like Midjourney getting pulled into big-tech stacks.

I’m grateful not only for any single mannequin, however for the truth that we now have choices — closed and open, native and hosted, reasoning-first and media-first. For journalists, builders, and enterprises, that range is the actual story of 2025.

Completely happy holidays and finest to you and your family members!

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