Introduction
The first week of December 2025 brought renewed competition among foundation-model labs, major movements in the AI-chip industry, and growing attention on specialised agents and workforce automation. While lighter than previous weeks, the news cycle revealed critical strategic shifts shaping the next chapter of AI.
1. OpenAI Declares “Code Red” as Gemini Adoption Surges
OpenAI reportedly issued an internal “code red”, shifting resources toward rapidly improving ChatGPT after Google’s latest Gemini 3 models began outperforming OpenAI on select internal and public benchmarks.
Meanwhile, Gemini’s user base continued accelerating — with reports suggesting ~200 million new users in just three months as Google integrates Gemini deeper into Search, Android, Chrome and Workspace.
Rumours also surfaced that OpenAI is training a new model codenamed “Garlic”, designed to surpass Gemini 3, alongside upgrades to its Imagegen stack.
2. Nvidia Deepens Its AI Hardware Strategy
Nvidia invested $2 billion in Synopsys, one of the world’s leading semiconductor design software firms, underscoring Nvidia’s push to dominate the chip-tooling ecosystem that underlies next-generation AI processors.
Separately, analysts noted that Google’s TPU roadmap has rapidly accelerated—suggesting that Alphabet could capture a significant share of the AI accelerator market by 2030, intensifying the long-term Nvidia–Google competition.
At NeurIPS 2025, Nvidia also announced:
DRIVE Alpamayo-R1 — a reasoning-capable vision-language-action model for autonomous mobility
updates to Nemotron open models and datasets
new speech-processing and safety-evaluation tools
These releases reinforce Nvidia’s strategy of owning not just the hardware layer, but the software and model-development stack as well.
3. Mistral AI Releases “Mistral Large 3”
Key strengths include:
robust multilingual understanding
resilience under connectivity constraints
strong performance across European regulatory and enterprise contexts
The release adds momentum to Europe’s growing ambition to develop sovereign AI capabilities rather than relying exclusively on U.S. or Chinese providers.
4. Specialised AI Agents Are Accelerating
Two notable developments:
Industry commentary predicted that agent networks — not single megamodels — will dominate operational AI in manufacturing, logistics and professional services.
5. AI Agents Could Automate Up to 40% of U.S. Jobs
A widely cited McKinsey Global Institute report projected that AI agents and robotics could eventually automate tasks representing up to 40% of U.S. jobs.
Most exposed roles include:
administrative work
information processing
routine reasoning tasks
Meanwhile, physically repetitive or hazardous jobs continue to see rapid adoption of robotics and embodied AI.
These findings reignited debate this week about whether AI adoption is plateauing or simply shifting from “hype” to structural economic transformation.
Conclusion
This week’s news reflects a sector in transition: foundation-model competition is intensifying, hardware ecosystems are consolidating, and the shift from general-purpose AI to specialised agent networks is accelerating. With policymakers and economists warning of profound labour-market disruption, the final weeks of 2025 are setting the tone for an AI-dominated decade ahead.
