Time for a catch-up!

Well, of course I would say that the most important news this week was the launch of my EU AI Training initiative in partnership with Ascendis 😁 … but not everyone’s got the message yet! 🤪

Anyway, let’s dive right in on all of the other news from the last week:

Big Sharks vs. small fish

The competition between Google and OpenAI continues to cause ripples, as does the repercussions of Sam Altman announcing his Code Red back on the 1st December in response to the releases from Google Gemini 3 and Nano Banana (see last week’s newsletter for details).

So, having brought forward the release of ChatGPT 5.2, OpenAI have now also done the same with GPT Image 1.5, and ChatGPT 5.2-CODEX. The latter is more of interest to the technical geeks out there, but the image generator is the really interesting news for me. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but from the demos I’ve seen online, it really does define that over-used phrase “game-changer”.

The images are professional quality, and they seem to have overcome the issue with script in images – yes, we’ve all been there when the perfect image is fine until you read the writing and it is complete gibberish. Well, that seems to no longer be the case.

This means that basically anyone can now produce professional quality images without much effort, which poses a massive threat to all of those in the creative industry. First it was the copywriters, and now it’s the designers and even potentially the photographers.

That’s why the release this week of the first draft of the Code of Practice on marking and labelling of AI-generated content under Article 50 of the EU AI Act was so timely. It may not save people’s jobs, but it may help to safeguard the public against deepfakes and manipulated text and images.

Google responded by releasing Gemini 3 Flash globally. This an AI model built for speed and cost efficiency, available via the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, Vertex AI, and Gemini Enterprise. This is clearly the escalation in what is likely to be a long battle, but one that will provide consumers with some amazing new tools.

Not to be outdone Nvidia introduced Nemotron 3, a new AI model family built for smarter AI agents. They released 3 models or variants to fit different requirements, from fast tasks to complex company work. For the geeks and technically minded amongst you the details are impressive.

Nemotron 3 Nano has 30 billion parameters (for quick low cost focussed tasks),  Nemotron 3 Super has 100 billion parameters and is built for multi-agent systems, and finally there is Nemotron 3 Ultra has 500 billion parameters and is designed to solve very enterprise scale problems.

However, what I thought was the most interesting was Nvidia also releasing NeMo Gym, a sandbox (training space) where AI agents can safely learn before real use. This anticipates some of the requirements under the EU AI Act, in terms of testing systems before they’re released to the public.

Legislation, policy and other news

There’s also been news around the issue of intellectual property the last few weeks, and as hinted at by the title of this week’s newsletter, Disney have featured numerous times.

It started a few months ago when Disney sent a letter accusing Google of copyright violations, including using Disney content to train AI tools like Veo. They also filed similar complaints against other AI companies such as Midjourney and Character.AI

So, this week YouTube (owned by Google) removed dozens of AI videos showing characters like Mickey Mouse, Deadpool, Moana, and Star Wars figures.

That happened the same week that Disney announced a $1bn equity investment in OpenAI, enabling the AI startup’s Sora video generation tool to use its characters.

Users of Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that draw on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters as part of a three-year licensing agreement between OpenAI and the entertainment giant.

So that’s all for now, but I’m not on holiday just yet, and there will be more posts over the holiday period … so stay informed, stay critical, and wherever possible - stay ahead.

Regards

Tom Carter