Hello, dear readers. Happy belated Thanksgiving and Black Friday!This year has felt like living inside a permanent DevDay. Every week, some lab drops a new model, a new agent framework, or a new “this changes everything” demo. It’s overwhelming. But it’s also the first year I’ve felt like AI is finally diversifying — not just one or two frontier models in the cloud, but a whole ecosystem: open and closed, giant and tiny, Western and Chinese, cloud and local.So for this Thanksgiving edition, here’s what I’m genuinely thankful for in AI in 2025 — the releases that feel like they’ll matter in 12–24 months, not just during this week’s hype cycle.1. OpenAI kept shipping strong: GPT-5, GPT-5.1, Atlas, Sora 2 and open weightsAs the company that undeniably birthed the “generative AI” era with its viral hit product ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI arguably had among the hardest tasks of any AI company in 2025: continue its growth trajectory even as well-funded competitors like Google with its Gemini models and other startups like Anthropic fielded their own highly competitive offerings. Thankfully, OpenAI rose to the challenge and then some. Its headline act was GPT-5, unveiled in August as the next frontier reasoning model, followed in November by GPT-5.1 with new Instant and Thinking variants that dynamically adjust how much “thinking time” they spend per task. In practice, GPT-5’s launch was bumpy — VentureBeat documented early math and coding failures and a cooler-than-expected community reaction in “OpenAI’s GPT-5 rollout is not going smoothly,” but it quickly course corrected based on user feedback and, as a daily user of this model, I’m personally pleased with it and impressed with it. At the same time, enterprises actually using …
