Your Morning AI Briefing: What Happened in AI This Week (December 2025)

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The AI landscape shifted dramatically this week. Pour yourself a cup of coffee - here's what happened while you were sleeping.

The Battle for AI Supremacy Heats Up

If you've been following the AI race, this week brought a major plot twist. According to Yahoo Finance, Google started 2025 behind but ended the year on top.

The numbers tell the story. Google's Gemini app saw its monthly active users explode from 350 million in March to 650 million users. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a "code red" emergency as his company scrambled to match Google's latest Gemini 3 models.

This represents a complete reversal from where we were just months ago. Remember when everyone was talking about ChatGPT? Now Google's stock is up more than 60% this year, outperforming all its megacap peers.

But OpenAI didn't just sit there taking punches. According to TechCrunch, they launched GPT-5.2 (codenamed "Garlic") on the same day Google made major announcements. Talk about competitive timing.

The traffic numbers are interesting too. From September to November 2025, ChatGPT referrals increased 52% year over year. Impressive, right? But here's the kicker - Gemini referral traffic grew 388% in that same period.

The DeepSeek Disruption Nobody Saw Coming

Here's where things get really interesting. A Chinese AI company called DeepSeek just challenged everything we thought we knew about AI development costs.

According to Crescendo AI, DeepSeek released models that match GPT-5 and Gemini 3 Pro performance while costing dramatically less. We're talking about DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale achieving comparable results to the giants, but without the massive price tag.

And these aren't toy models. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale achieved gold-medal performance in four elite international competitions:

The 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad
International Olympiad in Informatics
ICPC World Finals
China Mathematical Olympiad

Think about that for a second. A company nobody was talking about six months ago just proved you don't need OpenAI's budget to compete at the highest level.

As one University of North Carolina professor put it: "If I had to summarize 2025 in AI, we stopped making models bigger and started making them wiser."

AI's Growing Pains: The Good, Bad, and Ugly

Not everything in AI land is sunshine and roses. According to NPR, 2025 saw an explosion of AI-generated content - and not the good kind.

AI video tools like Sora can now put real people into completely fake situations. We've seen fake videos of people stuffing ballot boxes and fake local news interviews. Disney even signed a deal with OpenAI in December to let Sora users generate videos featuring over 200 Disney characters.

The scientific world is feeling it too. ScienceDaily reports that large language models like ChatGPT are increasing paper output, especially for non-native English speakers. That sounds great until you realize it's making it harder for decision makers to separate meaningful work from low-value content.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Reasoning models - LLMs that break down problems into multiple steps - became the industry standard this year. According to MIT Technology Review, all major mass-market chatbots now come with this technology.

And here's something genuinely cool: researchers at Duke University developed an AI that can uncover simple, readable rules behind extremely complex systems. According to ScienceDaily, this AI studies how systems evolve over time and reduces thousands of variables into compact equations. That's the kind of breakthrough that could actually change how we do science.

What This Means for You

So what should you take away from all this while finishing your coffee?

First, the AI race is wide open. Google's comeback shows that dominance in tech is never permanent. OpenAI's quick response shows they're not going down without a fight.

Second, the DeepSeek story proves that innovation doesn't always require Silicon Valley budgets. Expect more players to enter the game with creative approaches.

Third, we're entering a new phase where it's not about bigger models - it's about smarter ones. Reasoning capabilities and efficiency are the new battlegrounds.

And finally, the proliferation of AI-generated content means we all need to get better at critical thinking. Not everything that looks real is real anymore.

Want to stay ahead of the AI curve? Keep an eye on these companies and technologies. The next six months are going to be wild.