Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at OpenAI’s last — and biggest — announcement from its “12 Days of OpenAI” event; Apple’s potential entrance into the foldable market; and why Databricks is choosing to wait to go public. Let’s get into it.
P.S. We’re off for the holidays! Week in Review will be back in your inbox in the new year.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the successors to its o1 reasoning model family: o3 and o3-mini. While the models are not widely available yet, safety researchers can sign up for a preview. The reveal marks the end of the company’s “12 Days of OpenAI” event, which saw announcements for real-time vision capabilities, ChatGPT Search, and even a Santa voice for ChatGPT. You can catch up on everything you missed here.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses got a big upgrade this week. Members of Meta’s early-access program can now download firmware v11, which adds “live AI.” The feature lets wearers continuously converse with Meta AI to reference things they discussed earlier in the conversation — and it works with real-time video. Live translation between English and Spanish, French, or Italian, as well as functionality with Shazam are also included in v11.
UnitedHealth’s Optum left an AI chatbot, used by employees to ask questions about claims, exposed to the internet — and anyone could access it with a web browser. While the chatbot did not appear to contain or produce sensitive personal or protected health information, its inadvertent exposure comes at a time when its parent company faces scrutiny for its use of AI tools and algorithms to allegedly override doctors’ medical decisions and deny patient claims.