The AI race intensified this week as OpenAI reclaimed the benchmark throne with a new model dominating agentic tasks like ARC-AGI, while Anthropic's Opus 4.5 solved CORE-Bench for end-to-end scientific paper reproduction, and xAI unveiled its experimental Grok 4.20 as the mystery AI model sparking viral stock market crash fears. Leaders like DeepMind's Demis Hassabis declared AGI "on the horizon, within our grasp," urging societal prep, echoed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's bullish forecasts of exponential growth at the NYT DealBook Summit. Amid this frenzy, revenue leaks showed OpenAI and Anthropic achieving unprecedented growth, with costs plummeting per JP Morgan, fueling debates on whether AI is a bubble or the next industrial revolution.
Public trust lags behind the hype, as Andrew Ng highlighted Edelman and Pew surveys revealing Western skepticism toward AI, contrasting China's enthusiasm. Legal tensions escalated with a judge ordering OpenAI to disclose 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs in the New York Times copyright suit, while innovations like Google's Titans architecture at NeurIPS 2025 promised Transformer-level performance at RNN speeds.
Breakthroughs dominated headlines, starting with Elon Musk confirming that the viral "mystery AI model"—initially feared to crash the stock market via real-time stock analysis—was an experimental Grok 4.20 from xAI. Meanwhile, OpenAI surged ahead, its unnamed model leapfrogging Anthropic's Opus and Google's Gemini on agentic benchmarks, resembling a GPT-6 preview and signaling AGI's acceleration.
This model arms race intertwined with scientific feats: GPT-5 generated the key insight for a peer-reviewed paper in Physics Letters B, while Anthropic's Opus 4.5 reproduced scientific papers end-to-end on CORE-Bench.
Business metrics painted a boom, with Deedy Das aggregating media leaks on OpenAI and Anthropic revenues showing historic growth, prompting questions if AI is a bubble. Costs are crashing too, per JP Morgan Research:
At Anthropic, staff now use Claude for coding first drafts, a productivity milestone shared enthusiastically. CEO Dario Amodei doubled down at DealBook, stressing AI's national security role for democracies and predicting Moore's Law-like scaling where models excel at everything.
"AGI is on the horizon, it is within our grasp; our societies must prepare for this unprecedented change!" — Demis Hassabis
Philosophical depth came via Anthropic's Interviewer tool pilot, revealing professionals' optimism on AI productivity but worries over reliability and job identity:
Philosopher Amanda Askell tackled morality and consciousness in her first AMA. Expansion news included Google DeepMind launching a Singapore team for Gemini reasoning under Yi Tay, while Geoffrey Hinton noted Google overtaking OpenAI. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang predicted AI generating 90% of world's knowledge in 2-3 years. Yet challenges persist: Andrew Ng urged trust-building amid low Western AI excitement, and Google's Titans at NeurIPS advanced efficient architectures.
These developments underscore AI's maturation into a trillion-dollar force, with plummeting costs and revenue explosions enabling rapid scaling, but intensifying competition risks burnout or missteps amid legal scrutiny like the OpenAI logs case. As AGI nears per Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei, rebuilding public trust—as Andrew Ng advocates—will determine if innovation translates to broad adoption or regulatory walls, positioning frontrunners like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind to reshape economies while democracies race China.
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