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OpenAI drops yearly review on ChatGPT — but only for English countries
TechCrunch has spotted a flashy, card- and graphics-based «Your Year with ChatGPT» getting rolled out this holiday season.
It’s supposed to be a «lightweight, privacy-forward, and user-controlled» little romp through the year.
The trick is that you need an English account for those, but at least it works from the free tiers all the way up to Pro — with a minimum of engagement, wile Enterprise and Edu accounts are left out.
Everyone else can turn on a slightly less flashy rehash of your GPT usage for the year by simply typing «Show me my year with ChatGPT» right in the chat window, and it will offer a nice little summary of your usage.
It’s not fancy or flashy, but it might turn out a smile or two as you remember some epic AI moments of the year gone by.
Read more at: TechCrunch and 9to5Mac.
OpenAI quietly rolls out age controls in ChatGPT
The age-gating is done in the background magic of the AI, determining general topics the user talks about, or things like the times of day the user is on ChatGPT.
It will not require mass-identification of the user base, unless you want to complain about getting age-gated to the «teen experience.»
To do this, you can upload a selfie to ChatGPT in the Account Settings, by clicking on Age Verification and selecting Verify Age.
From here, ChatGPT can determine your age from a simple selfie, but if that is not enough, you might have to offer up a Government ID.
On OpenAI’s Age prediction page, it says «this feature is still rolling out, so you might not see it yet depending on where you live.»
More at: OpenAI’s Age prediction page
OpenAI introduces more granular control of their personalities
Now, the controls for this has become much more detailed, with added «characteristics.»
You can control to what extent you want your chatbot to be Warm or Enthusiastic, and how much it uses Emoji and Headers & Lists, in addition to using a different «main voice and tone.»
The new settings are available to all users in the «Personalization» setting.
This is in line with OpenAI’s policy of making ChatGPT more personalized and customized for the end user — and we can probably expect more of this in the future.
Read more: writeup at The Verge.
ChatGPT now has an Apple Music app
That means you can ask ChatGPT to create playlists, find songs, albums and artists — which can be helpful for those faint songs you can only describe from memory, or for recommending similar songs in the same lane.
The app can even create complex playlists based on natural language and preferences right in ChatGPT, and will give you an option to add it to your library — always asking politely first.
To add it, go to Settings->Apps->Browse apps in the ChatGPT app, and add it from the list. You will then have access by typing /Apple Music.
You will be asked to sign in to Apple Music from your account, and non-subscribers will only be able to listen to short previews of songs.
Read more: MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and Digital Music News.
Google launches Gemini 3 Flash; faster, cheaper and the new default
The model is especially good at agentic workflows, and in fast reasoning, Google says.
On the benchmarks it performs stunningly well for the price, even beating Gemini 3 Pro at MMMU-Pro, which tests for multimodal understanding. It also ticks in at 33.7% in Humanity’s Last Exam, just a little below GPT-5.2.
Google has priced the model for efficiency, too, with a cost of $0.50 for 1 million tokens of input, and $3.00 for the same output. This is substantially lower than 3 Pro and is only beaten by Grok 4.1 Fast and Gemini 2.5 Flash.
The model is rolling out in all channels as of today, and will become the default in the Gemini app and on the web, as well as in AI Mode, where it will much improve reasoning.
Read more: Google: launch page, for developers, and in AI Mode. Writeups at The Verge, 9to5Google and Engadget.
OpenAI launches GPT Image 1.5, up to 4x faster and more precise, lifelike
It also «adheres to your intent more reliably» and keeps elements of the picture, like lighting, composition, and appearance across the editing phase.
The outputs are also much more lifelike, making it ever more difficult to discern AI images from reality.
Does it beat Nano Banana? Yes, it does, according to the almost gold-standard LMArena benchmark, where it instantly climbed to the top spot on «Text-to-image» and «Image Edit.»
At the same time, OpenAI is launching a new feature called ChatGPT Image on the web, which is a handy way to access predefined styles for your pictures and share those you like.
They are even seasonally aware enough to let you turn pictures into Christmas cards.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement (includes lots of examples), ChatGPT Image. Writeups on Engadget, TechCrunch. Discussion on r/Singularity.
Merriam-Webster chooses «slop» as the word of the year
They define it as «digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,» which fits the bill quite nicely.
— It’s such an illustrative word, said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the announcement. — It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous.
The original word in the 1700s was intended to mean «soft mud,» writes the dictionary, and came to mean «food waste» in the 1800s, before settling on the modern meaning as «rubbish» or «a product of little or no value.»
But mass-produced videos of AI cats doing silly little things? A lot of people actually like those, and they are in everyone’s feeds right now.
Read more: Merriam-Webster’s announcement, details from The Associated Press. Writeups by Engadget, Ars Technica, The Verge.
Amazon launches mini-chatbot to ask about the book you’re reading
It lets you «ask questions about the book you’re reading and receive spoiler-free answers» up to where you are in the book, Amazon says on its release page.
It is intended for those long reads or breaks between them, so you can ask for a refresher on «plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements» without leaving the page.
The chatbot is available for «thousands of best-selling Kindle books» in the Kindle iOS app in the USA, and is on it’s way to Android «next year.»
There is no option for authors to drop out, and the feature is always on, Amazon tells Publishers Lunch — and some are wondering if Amazon can be sued for creating derivative works.
Read more: Amazon’s release page, additional information on Publishers Lunch. Writeups on Gizmodo, Engadget.
Purdue will make AI competency a graduation requirement from 2026
The new requirement will not focus on coding or developing AI, but rather furthering an understanding of how to work with AI in the students’ chosen fields, in consultation with employers and outside institutions.
This means that every course at the school will have to have some kind of AI element, and Purdue is hard at work on the syllabus for 2026.
— The reach and pace of AI’s impact to society, including many dimensions of higher education, means that we at Purdue must lean in and lean forward and do so across different functions at the university, says Purdue President Mung Chiang in a press release.
The idea is for students to have «the requisite critical thinking skills to understand, evaluate and effectively use AI technologies and to keep pace with their future changes.»
Read more: Purdue’s press release, writeup at Forbes, discussion on Hacker News.
Google rolling out live translations on Android, as Apple launches in Europe
Apple has had this function in the US since iOS 26 in June, 2025, and just rolled out the functionality in Europe in iOS 26.2.
The idea is to use Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio as the base model, to «preserve the tone, emphasis and cadence of each speaker,» according to 9to5Google.
The feature is only available in the USA, Mexico and India so far, and only on Android, but Google says «we’ll be bringing it to iOS and more countries in 2026.»
All you need to do is tap the «Live translate» button in the Google Translate app, point your phone in the direction of the speaker, and it will start translating, with an understanding of slang, idioms and euphemisms.
Apple is a little more quirky than Google, requiring the use of AirPods Pro 2 or 3, or AirPods 4 with ANC to work properly.
Read more: Google’s announcement, writeups on 9to5Google, Ars Technica. MacRumors on Apple’s capabilities.
ChatGPT’s «adult mode» scheduled to debut in early 2026
OpenAI now uses the term «adult mode» for the feature, and expects it to arrive in Q1 next year — once they are comfortable with their age-gating.
During the introduction of GPT-5.2, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, said that they want to stick the age prediction on their models before debuting NSFW content, according to The Verge.
The idea behind age verification is primarily to impose stricter rules for teens on ChatGPT, but the practical upside is that they can also have looser rules for adults.
The tricky part is to not «misidentify adults,» Simo said.
Disney invests $1 billion in cross-licensing deal for characters in Sora
The deal will license some 200 Disney-owned characters from the likes of Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars for use in Sora, free of charge (as in money) and charges (as in lawsuits).
The deal will also see Disney adopt ChatGPT and Sora internally, which is the other way of the license — helping Disney do everything from light sketches to development planning.
Continue reading “Disney invests $1 billion in cross-licensing deal for characters in Sora”
OpenAI launches GPT-5.2, and it beats Gemini 3 in a lot of benchmarks
It comes after OpenAI felt overtaken in the AI race by Anthropic and Google’s Gemini, when CEO Altman declared «Code Red» to overtake their rivals. That was a little over a week ago, and now the results are in.
Continue reading “OpenAI launches GPT-5.2, and it beats Gemini 3 in a lot of benchmarks”
ChatGPT tops Apple’s App Store free downloads for 2025
Topping this chart is another clear indicator of how people have come to use a lot of AI.
Besting Google on the list could also indicate ChatGPT’s real threat to the search behemoth — as more and more people prefer to use it instead of Google’s offerings, TechCrunch notes.
The only other AI app on Apple’s top list is Google Gemini, ticking in at a respectable 10th place, still ahead of Facebook and Temu, which topped the chart last year.
Read more: Apple’s 2025 chart, writeups by MacRumors and TechCrunch.