👋If you are a new reader, my name is Danar Mustafa. I write about product management focusing on AI, tech, business and strategy management. You can visit my Substack Newsletter here or visit my Linkedin here. I am based in Sweden and founder of AImognad.se and aiceostrategy.com – the leading AI maturity Model Matrix. Author of AI Agents: When AI Becomes Part of the Team.

My mission with this newsletter? To have your back in navigating the fast-moving world of tech and startups. I dig up the best and most under-the-radar stories so you stay ahead—no noise, just signal.

📌 Infograhpic of the Month 📌 The Most Valuable Startups of 2025

🧠Big Tech News 🧠

OpenAI releases GPT-5.1: OpenAI rolled out GPT‑5.1 in mid-November, an upgraded model with improved reasoning and new “Instant” and “Thinking” modes. The update enhances ChatGPT’s capabilities (including adding group chat features) and is available via API and ChatGPT for all users.

Google launches Gemini 3: Google launched Gemini 3 (its next-gen AI model) on Nov 18, boasting record benchmark scores and strong multimodal abilities. Early tests show Gemini 3 outperforming prior models on many tasks, though coding remains a challenge.

Microsoft invests $5B in Anthropic: In a major cloud partnership, Microsoft is investing $5 billion into Anthropic and will host Claude models on Azure. Announced Nov 18, the deal also sees Nvidia putting up to $10B, and Anthropic committing $30B on Azure capacity.

Apple to use Google’s AI for Siri: Bloomberg revealed Apple is finalizing a $1 billion/year deal to license Google’s Gemini AI (1.2-trillion-parameter model) as a “stopgap” to power a smarter Siri until Apple’s own AI is ready.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5: Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, its new flagship frontier AI model, on Nov 25. Claude 4.5 is the first model to break 80% on the SWE-Bench Verified coding benchmark, setting a new high-water mark for AI coding.

Meta’s $600B AI infrastructure bet: Meta announced plans to invest $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure (especially AI data centers) over the next three years.

AWS and OpenAI Announce $38 Billion Multi-Year Partnership. Amazon Web Services and OpenAI signed a partnership valued at $38 billion over seven years, with OpenAI running AI workloads on AWS using hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs.

⚖️ Politics & Legal Affairs ⚖️

Trump Administration Drafts Order to Block State AI Regulations. The White House drafted an executive order directing the Justice Department to sue states that pass AI regulations, establishing an “AI Litigation Task Force” and potentially withholding federal funding from non-compliant states.

EU Proposes Delaying AI Act Implementation to December 2027. The European Commission’s “Digital Omnibus” package proposes delaying full implementation of the EU AI Act’s high-risk provisions from August 2026 to December 2027.

U.S. launches “Genesis Mission” for AI in science: On Nov 24, President Trump signed an Executive Order establishing the “Genesis Mission”– a Manhattan Project-scale effort to harness federal scientific data and AI to accelerate breakthroughs.

🔬 Research & Development 🔬

Google’s AI agents with memory: Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA 2, a game-playing AI agent that “actually thinks” and learns continuously. SIMA 2 demonstrated zero-shot mastery of brand-new video games, multimodal command understanding, autonomous self-improvement loops, and even explained its reasoning mid-game.

AI Dementia Detection Achieves 97% Accuracy Using Federated Learning. Örebro University researchers developed an AI system analyzing EEG data to distinguish dementia with over 97% accuracy using privacy-preserving federated learning. The system uses explainable-AI techniques to highlight diagnostic signals for medical professionals.

France launches AI lung cancer screening: France initiated IMPULSION, a national lung cancer screening pilot that will leverage AI across 100+ hospitals. Announced Nov 17, the €6 million program selected Coreline Soft as its exclusive AI partner to provide advanced chest CT analysis software.

🛠️ Tools & Product Launches 🛠️

OpenAI and Perplexity Launch AI Shopping Assistants.

Both companies launched AI shopping features timed for holiday shopping, with OpenAI partnering with Shopify for in-chat checkout and Perplexity partnering with PayPal.OpenAI globally launched group chats allowing up to 20 people to collaborate with ChatGPT in shared conversations, transforming it from a one-on-one assistant into a collaborative workspace.

World Labs Launches Marble: Commercial 3D World Model

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs publicly launched Marble, generating editable 3D environments from text prompts, images, or videos. The platform exports Gaussian splats and meshes compatible with Vision Pro and Quest 3 VR headsets, backed by $230 million in funding.

ChatGPT Launches Group Chats Globally

OpenAI globally launched group chats allowing up to 20 people to collaborate with ChatGPT in shared conversations, transforming it from a one-on-one assistant into a collaborative workspace. Personal settings and memory remain private within group conversations.

🚀 Startups & Investments 🚀

Cursor Parent Company Raises $2.3 Billion at $29.3 Billion Valuation

Anysphere, parent of AI coding assistant Cursor, raised a massive Series D roughly tripling its valuation in six months. The company crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue with over 300 employees, making all four MIT-graduate co-founders billionaires.

AI Music Startup Suno Raises $250 Million at $2.45 Billion Valuation

Despite facing copyright lawsuits from major labels, Suno raised $250 million led by Menlo Ventures with Nvidia’s NVentures participation. The company has reached $200 million in annual revenue for AI-generated music creation.

Inception Raises $50 Million Seed for Diffusion-Based AI Models

Stanford professor Stefano Ermon’s startup raised seed funding to develop diffusion-based alternatives to autoregressive models, with angel backing from Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy.

Physical Intelligence Raises $600M at $5.6 Billion Valuation

The startup developing general AI software for robots raised $600 million led by Alphabet’s CapitalG, with participation from Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital, and T. Rowe Price. The company aims to build a universal “brain” for any robot application

🌍 AI News in EU & Sweden 🌍

SAP Unveils EU AI Cloud for European Digital Sovereignty

SAP announced EU AI Cloud, a unified sovereign AI platform supporting EU data residency with partnerships from Cohere, Mistral AI, and OpenAI. SAP plans to invest more than $20 billion into EU sovereign cloud and AI solutions.

EU Commission Proposes Digital Omnibus to Simplify AI Act

The Commission unveiled proposals extending high-risk AI compliance deadlines to December 2027 while introducing an EU-level regulatory sandbox from 2028. The changes allow bias detection using sensitive personal data under strict safeguards.

🧠 AI in Healthcare & Education 🧠

FDA Committee Tackles Generative AI Mental Health Devices

The FDA’s Digital Health Advisory Committee addressed novel risks of AI chatbots for mental health, including hallucinations and symptom worsening. Despite authorizing over 1,250 AI-enabled medical devices, none have been authorized specifically for mental health uses.

OpenAI Partners with 400,000 K-12 Educators

OpenAI announced free ChatGPT access for approximately 400,000 K-12 educators through the next academic year. A RAND survey found over half of U.S. students now use AI for school—a 15 percentage point increase from two years ago.

🤖 Robotics 🤖

Figure AI Retires Figure 02 Robots After BMW Factory Deployment

Figure AI retired its F.02 humanoid robots after 11 months at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, where they loaded over 90,000 sheet-metal parts onto welding fixtures with 99%+ accuracy. The deployment contributed to production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles.

Agility’s Digit Robot Moves 100,000+ Totes at GXO Logistics

Agility Robotics announced its Digit humanoid moved more than 100,000 totes at a GXO warehouse in Georgia, performing “last meter” work transferring inventory requiring human-like dexterity. This positions Agility slightly ahead in measurable real-world output among humanoid competitors.

🎮 Hardware 🎮

NVIDIA Reports Record $57 Billion Quarterly Revenue

NVIDIA reported Q3 FY2026 revenue of $57.0 billion (up 62.5% YoY), beating estimates by $2 billion. CEO Jensen Huang revealed a $500 billion cumulative order book for Blackwell and Rubin infrastructure through 2026, with data center revenue at a record $51.2 billion.

Meta Reportedly Considering Google TPUs, Challenging NVIDIA

NVIDIA shares fell 4% after reports that Meta is considering using Google’s TPUs starting in 2027. Google released its 7th-generation Ironwood TPU.

Anthropic Announces $50 Billion Data Center Plan

Anthropic signed a $50 billion partnership with UK-based Fluidstack to build custom AI facilities in Texas and New York, expected online throughout 2026. The data centers will be optimized for Claude AI models.

📊 Market Insights & Investment Trends 📊

AI Agents Market Projected to Reach $48.3 Billion by 2030

The global AI agents market is estimated to grow from $8 billion in 2025 to $48.3 billion by 2030 (43.3% CAGR), spanning hyperscale, enterprise, and edge deployments. Growth is driven by advances in model development and agent orchestration.

MIT Study: AI Can Replace 11.7% of U.S. Workforce

MIT’s “Iceberg Index” study found AI can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, representing $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, healthcare, and professional services. Tennessee, North Carolina, and Utah are using the platform to evaluate workforce impacts.

🧠 Adoption Trends & Consumer Behavior 🧠

Generative AI Adoption Reaches 54.6% Among U.S. Adults

The St. Louis Federal Reserve reports generative AI adoption increased 10 percentage points in 12 months to 54.6% among adults ages 18-64. Work adoption rose from 33.3% to 37.4%, with the Fed estimating up to 1.3% aggregate labor productivity gain since ChatGPT’s introduction.

McKinsey: 88% of Organizations Use AI, But Only 39% See EBIT Impact

McKinsey’s global survey finds 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one function, but nearly two-thirds remain in experiment/pilot mode. Only 39% report enterprise-level EBIT impact, while 62% are experimenting with AI agents.

🧠 Research Paper of the Month 🧠

“Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?”

NeurIPS 2025 Runner-Up Best Paper Award

This paper challenges a foundational assumption in LLM research: that Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) creates genuinely new reasoning capabilities. Through systematic testing, researchers discovered that RLVR enhances sampling efficiency but does NOT expand reasoning capacity beyond what exists in base models. While RLVR-trained models outperform at small sample sizes, base models achieve higher scores when sampling broadly—meaning RLVR narrows exploration rather than expanding the solution space.

Real-world implications: Enterprises investing in RLVR training may be optimizing within existing capabilities rather than creating new ones. The paper suggests distillation genuinely expands reasoning while current RLVR methods do not, directly impacting AI development roadmaps at major labs.

🧠 Tools to try 🧠

World Labs Marble

Creates editable, downloadable 3D environments from text prompts, photos, or videos.

ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime

Sub-150ms live transcription across 90+ languages with “negative latency” prediction that anticipates words. Outperforms Google Gemini Flash 2.5, OpenAI GPT-4o Mini, and Deepgram Nova 3 in benchmarks.

Google NotebookLM with Deep Research

Autonomous research agent that browses hundreds of websites, creates research plans, and generates comprehensive source-grounded reports.

🧠 AI Conferences (December 2025) 🧠

NeurIPS 2025

December 2-7, 2025 | San Diego Convention Center, USA The premier academic AI/ML conference featuring over 4,000 accepted papers, tutorials, main sessions, expo, workshops, and poster sessions covering reasoning, diffusion models, LLMs, and reinforcement learning.

The AI Summit New York

December 10-11, 2025 | Javits Center, New York Enterprise AI conference with 5,000+ attendees, 350+ speakers across 10 stages, hands-on workshops, hackathons, AI Playground demos, and AIconics Awards focused on real-world AI implementation.

Global AI Show Abu Dhabi

December 8-9, 2025 | Space42 Arena, Abu Dhabi UAE’s premier AI exhibition under theme “AI 2031: Accelerating Intelligent Futures” with 5,000+ attendees and 200+ AI experts, supported by the National Program of Artificial Intelligence

Bonus Tips

Cursor AI: The AI Code Editor Transforming Software Development