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AI Daily Roundup: December 2, 2025

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AI Daily Roundup: December 2, 2025

TL;DR

🏢 Company Announcements

OpenAI and NORAD team up to bring new magic to “NORAD Tracks Santa” featuring three ChatGPT holiday tools for creating festive elves, toy coloring pages, and custom Christmas stories. The collaboration uses existing OpenAI infrastructure.

OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. The partnership embeds frontier research and engineering into accounting and IT services.

OpenAI awarded up to $2 million in grants for research on AI and mental health. The program supports projects studying real-world risks, benefits, and applications to improve safety.

NVIDIA expanded open-source models and tools for digital and physical AI at NeurIPS. The release includes new reasoning world models and datasets.

Gradium, a Paris-based AI voice startup, raised $70M seed backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. The company launched from stealth this week.

Ascentra Labs raised $2 million to help consultants replace all-night Excel sessions with AI. The London-based startup was founded by former McKinsey consultants.

Norton Neo launched as an AI browser with a safety-first approach. It positions itself as a competitor to OpenAI and Perplexity browsers.

Arcee released new Trinity models under Apache 2.0 to boost U.S. open-source AI. The models aim to counter Chinese research lab dominance in open-weight language models.

Apple appointed Amar Subramanya as new AI chief. Subramanya previously led engineering for Gemini Assistant at Google.

📰 Top Stories

Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium nabs $70M seed. The funding follows backer Xavier Niel’s French telecom interests.

Ascentra Labs raises $2 million. The startup targets the $250 billion global consulting industry with AI tools.

The Download covers AI’s economic impact. The report examines AI’s role in economic transformation.

OpenAI disclosed a Mixpanel security incident on November 26. No API content, credentials, or payment details were exposed.

With AI browsers creating fresh security concerns, Norton Neo launched. The browser prioritizes user safety over features.

NVIDIA announced new models for autonomous driving research. The release includes a new reasoning world model.

🎬 Videos Worth Watching

The AI That Changed Biology Forever. A video exploring AI’s role in biomedical research breakthroughs.

Mind uploading: Can human brains be digitally copied?. Discussion with Michael Levin on brain digitization.

Hardware vs software: Which is more important for intelligence?. Analysis of hardware’s role in AI advancement.

The weirdest idea in science. Exploring unconventional scientific concepts.

💬 Community Discussions

No fucking way. A Reddit discussion thread on the OpenAI platform.

Sam Altman told employees he was declaring a “code red”. Internal memo about prioritizing ChatGPT improvements.

Z Image Turbo ControlNet released by Alibaba on HF. Open-source release for image generation.

Now you can go to all your favorite movie sets. User sharing photos generated with Nano Banana Pro.

🔬 Research & Papers

Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Geometry Solving with Efficient Heuristic Auxiliary Constructions. Paper on automated theorem proving for IMO-level geometry.

Chunking Strategies for Multimodal AI Systems. Survey of techniques for efficient multimodal data processing.

A Rosetta Stone for AI Benchmarks. Framework for stitching benchmarks to track long-term AI progress.

Trification: A Comprehensive Tree-based Strategy Planner for Fact-Checking. Method for structural verification in automated fact-checking.

📧 From the Experts

Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document. Analysis of Claude 4.5 Opus capabilities.

DeepSeek-V3.2. Discussion on DeepSeek-V3.2 model performance.

📚 Further Reading