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Welcome to the Techbrew Ride Home for Friday, December 12, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today okay, fine, says Sam. Here's a new GPT model so you'll hopefully stop saying we're behind broadcom as another AI bellwether. Now that Disney is in bed with OpenAI, they're ceasing and assisting Google and of course, the weekend Long Read Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You may have noticed that your customers love webinar and video content. But you also might have noticed that if you've ever put a webinar or video together, then it can eat up a lot of your time and budget. But now, thankfully, there's a singular tool that can streamline your team's video and webinar workflows. Wistia Wistia can scale your content output with AI powered tools that help you create, edit and repurpose videos and webinars fast. And speaking of webinars, you can host engaging, easy to set up webinars in Wistia, complete with built in analytics. With Wistia, you don't have to pay for multiple video tools, hop between platforms, or constantly re upload files, create, edit, collaborate and publish all in one place. Head to wistia.com brew to learn more. That's W-I-S-T-I A.com brew with Wistia, you can expect less work and more plays well, I told you I expected OpenAI to do something before the end of the year to try to arrest their sort of narrative slide, they sort of had to. So quoting Wired, OpenAI has introduced GPT 5.2, its smartest artificial intelligence model yet, with performance gains across writing, coding and reasoning benchmarks. The launch comes just days after CEO Sam Altman internally declared a Code Red, a company wide push to improve ChatGPT amid intense competition from rivals. We announced this Code Red to really signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in one particular area and that's a way to really define priorities said OpenAI's CEO of Applications Fiji Simo, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday. We have had an increase in resources focused on ChatGPT in general, much like the company's recent model launches, GPT 5.2 is shipping as a series of models Instant, which responds faster and is better for information Finding Thinking, which excels at coding, math and planning and Pro, the most powerful tier of OpenAI models that delivers higher accuracy on difficult questions. OpenAI calls GPT 5.2 its best model yet for everyday professional use. GPT 5.2 thinking notched the highest scores to date on GDPVol, an OpenAI benchmark that compares performance between AI models and human professionals across 44 real world occupations. The company says the model beat human professionals in over 70% of tasks and completed them 11 times faster. OpenAI's post training lead Max Schwarzer says the new release should also offer a substantial reduction in hallucinations. The company says GPT 5.2 thinking hallucinated 38% less than GPT 5.1 on benchmarks measuring answers to factual questions. The company is bringing GPT 5.2 to both ChatGPT users and developers on OpenAI's API product. OpenAI says the new series of models brings clear gains across everyday and advanced use cases. End quote End quoting the Verge OpenAI says the GPT 5.2 model series, which includes the Instant, Thinking and Pro models, is better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long contexts, using tools and handling complex multi step projects. Aidan Clark, a VP of research at OpenAI, said in the briefing that the team gave a senior immunology researcher access to GPT 5.2 Pro. He said that when the researcher asked the model to generate the most important unanswered questions about the immune system, they said it produced sharper questions and stronger explanations for why those questions matter than any other Frontier model. In a blog post, OpenAI also said GPT 5.2 is better for AI agents workflows, part of the ever intensifying battle between AI companies to offer the most efficient and useful AI agents. The vision is for ChatGPT to be the best possible personalized assistant, max Schwartzer, a researcher at OpenAI, said during the briefing. The company also said its thinking model hallucinates less than its predecessor, making sure to highlight that the distinction makes it more useful for professional looking for trustworthy agentic AI tools. Notion Box, Shopify, Harvey, Zoom and Databricks were among the pre release testers and they received access a couple of weeks ago, per OpenAI. End Quote Simon Willison says the GPT 5.2 models match GPT 5 and 5.1 with a 4000 context window and 128,000 max output tokens, but have a newer knowledge cutoff of August 31, 2025 versus September 30, 2024, separately quoting the Verge Fiji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, told reporters during a Thursday briefing about GPT 5.2 that she expects adult mode to debut within ChatGPT in the first quarter of 2026, adding that the company wants to get better at age prediction before introducing the new feature. OpenAI is currently in the early stages of testing its age prediction model, which is designed to automatically figure out when to apply certain safeguards and content restrictions for users under 18. CMO said during the briefing that the company is already testing the model in certain countries to gauge its ability to identify teens and not misidentify adults, something that the company wants to get right before it debuts the adult features. End quote. President Trump has signed an executive order aimed at preempting a growing number of state AI laws, quoting Reuters. We want to have one central source of approval, trump told reporters flanked by top advisors including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett, arguing that 50 different regulatory regimes hamper the growth of the nascent industry. To win United States, AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation, the order said, adding that the current patchwork of different regulatory regimes makes compliance more challenging, especially for startups. The order will give the Trump administration tools to push back on the most onerous state regulations, said White House AI adviser David Sacks. The administration will not oppose rules governing AI that relate to child safety, he added. It directs the secretary of commerce to evaluate state laws for conflicts with Trump's AI priorities and to block those states in conflict from accessing the $42 billion broadband equity access and Deployment Fund. Democratic Representative Don Bayer, who co chairs a bipartisan caucus on AI, said the order would squelch safety reforms passed by states and create a, quote, lawless wild west for AI companies that puts Americans at risk. He warned that the order would reduce the likelihood of congressional action and likely violated the 10th Amendment, which says that any powers not specifically given to the federal government belong to the states or the people. Trump's order called for his administration to work with Congress to craft a national standard that forbids state laws which conflict with federal policy, protects children, prevents censorship, respects copyrights and protects communities. Until such a standard was in place, the order called for actions to, quote, check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threatened to stymie innovation. End quote. On the Are we in an AI bubble slash? Is OpenAI in trouble front? Broadcom reported Q4 revenue up 28% year on year to $18.02 billion and forecasts Q1 revenue above estimates with AI chip sales doubling to $8.2 billion. Quoting CNBC along with Nvidia, Broadcom has been the other major winner among US Semiconductor companies from the AI boom. The company's stock price is up 75% so far in 2025 after doubling last year as its custom chips such as Google's Tensor processing units are gaining increasing traction in the market as a rival to Nvidia's graphics processing units. Investors are closely watching to see Broadcom confirm that those companies are continuing to engage and are on track to buy and deploy custom ch. Broadcom revealed during a September earnings call that it had signed a customer that had placed a $10 billion order for custom chips. At the time, Broadcom didn't say who it was, but on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan revealed that the mystery customer was AI lab Anthropic, which placed an order for the latest Google Tensor processing units. We received a $10 billion order to sell the latest TPU Ironwood racks to Anthropic, said Tan, speaking on Broadcom's fourth quarter earnings call on Thursday. He also said Anthropic had placed an additional 11 billion dol dollar order with Broadcom in the company's latest quarter. While Broadcom typically doesn't disclose its large customers, Tan's September remark drew significant investor attention amid the AI infrastructure boom. A Broadcom official told CNBC in October that the mystery customer wasn't OpenAI, which has its own agreement to purchase chips from the chip maker. Broadcom makes custom chips called Asics, which some experts believe are more efficient for certain artificial intelligence algorithms than the market dominating chips from Nvidia. Broadcom helps make Google's TPUs, and last, the search company bragged that it trained its state of the art Gemini 3 model entirely on its TPUs. The chipmaker calls its custom AI chips XPUs, and on Thursday, Tan said his company was delivering entire server racks, not just chips, to Anthropic, which is Broadcom's fourth XPU customer. Broadcom on Thursday also said that it had secured a fifth customer for its custom chip business. That Customer placed a $1 billion order during the fourth quarter, but once again, Broadcom did not reveal the customer. It's a real customer and it grow, tan said. End quote. We all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that defined some of today's most influential companies. Hosted by Sequoia's Rule of Botha, Crucible Moments Season 3 pulls back the curtain on the untold stories behind companies like Stripe, Zipline and Palo Alto Networks, Klarna Supercell and more. I loved the recent episode with the founder of Zipline and how even late to the game, they are leapfrogging the bigger players to bring true autonomous drone delivery not just to hospitals, but now to customers of the likes of Walmart and Chipotle. I might win that burrito delivery bet someday soon. Tune in to Sequoia's new season of Crucible Moments to discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were built. Crucible Moments is available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com. Keeping pace with data growth in the age of AI is like trying to find enough shelf space after a trip to a big box store. AI and data growth have outpaced the old storage model. Manual management of traditional storage can't keep up, so it's time for a new, unified approach from Pure Storage. They help organizations simplify and automate how data is stored and managed, eliminating silos and putting intelligence at the center of operations. When you don't know where data lives or how it's used, governance slips, visibility, and compliance can become constant challenges. The Pure Storage platform unifies storage into a single, intelligent layer that can turn data into a governed, virtualized cloud of data with guaranteed outcomes. Learn more@PureStorage.com Morning Brew that's PureStorage.com Morning Brew there's one big addendum to yesterday's news of that Disney deal with OpenAI. Quoting Variety now that Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a massive scale, using AI models and services to, quote, commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement in its AI systems. Google is infringing Disney's copyrights on a massive scale by copying a large corpus of Disney's copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop generative artificial intelligence models and services, and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers in violation of Disney's copyrights, reads the letter to Google's general counsel from law firm Jenner and Block on behalf of Disney. According to the letter, which Variety has reviewed, Disney alleges that Google's AI systems and services infringe Disney characters, including those from Frozen, the Lion King, Moana, the Little Mermaid, Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy, Toy Story, Brave, Ratatouille, Monsters Inc. Lilo and Stitch, Inside out, and franchises such as Star wars, the Simpsons and Marvel's Avengers and Spider Man. In its letter, Disney included examples of images it claims were generated by text prompts in Google's AI apps, including of Darth Vader. The allegations against Google follow cease and desist letters that Disney sent earlier to meta and character AI, as well as litigation Disney filed together with NBCUniversal and Warner Brothers Discovery against AI companies Midjourney and Minimum Max alleging copyright infringement. As for comment, a Google spokesperson said, we have a long standing and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney and will continue to engage with them more generally. We use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google extended and content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content. According to Disney, the company has been raising its concerns with Google for months, but says Google hasn't done anything in response and that if anything, Google's infringement has only increased during that time. Bob Iger, Disney CEO, in an interview with CNBC Thursday, said, well, we've been aggressive at protecting our IP and we've gone after other companies that have not honored our ip, not respected our ip, not valued it, and this is another example of us doing just that. Iger said Disney had been in discussions with Google, basically expressing our concerns about its AI system's alleged infringement and ultimately because we didn't really make any progress, the conversations didn't bear fruit. We felt we had no choice but to send them a cease and desist letter. Disney's letter to Google demands that Google immediately cease further copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing and creating derivative works of Disney's copyrighted characters in outputs of Google's AI services, including through YouTube's mobile app, YouTube, Shorts and YouTube End Quote. Time for the weekend Long read suggestions first up from Wired, a profile of AI hearing aid startup Fortel, which has raised $150 million so far and is targeting affluent clients in New York city with a $6,800 device that uses a custom chip. A secret is percolating at dinner parties, salons and cocktail gatherings among the August New York city elite. It's whispered in the circles of financial masters of the universe, Hollywood stars and owners of sports teams. Have you heard about Foretell? Many haven't. Or if they did hear, they might not have made out the words through noisy cross conversations. Once they do know, particularly if they're boomers, they want it desperately. Foretell is a hearing aid, one that claims to use AI to provide a dramatically superior aural experience. The chosen few included in its beta test claim that it seems to top the performance of high end devices they'd been unhappily using. These testers have made pilgrimages to Foretell's headquarters on the fifth floor of a facility in New York City's trendy SoHo neighborhood, where they were fitted for the hearing aids, which from the outside look pretty much like standard over the ear teardrop shaped devices. But the big moment comes when a Foretell staffer takes them down to the street level. There, among street clatter, honking cabs and delivery trucks backing up to luxury stores, they are asked to conduct a conversation with a Foretell worker. Two other employees stand behind them, adding their own loud discourse to the urban cacophony. Despite the din, the testers clearly make out what the person in front of them is. The clouds lift. Angels croon. This was so incredible that I burst into tears, says Ashley Tudor, one of the seemingly few beta testers who isn't famous or powerful, though she is married to a venture capitalist. Then, from the Washington Post, a look at a so called etiquette camp for young founders in San Francisco, which teaches them how to dress, act and talk like, well, the modern founder. Quote tech founders have traditionally eschewed business norms as they worked to upend the status quo, sticking with hoodies and jeans even as dorm room dreams became billion dollar corporations and donning suits only when hauled before a court or Congress. Scruffy grooming and unrefined social skills became hallmarks of the gifted entrepreneur laser focused on changing the world. But the expectations of how a tech founder looks and acts and the role models of Silicon Valley's success are shifting as the industry gains power and influence. Tech employers and investors want the full package, said Caroline Simard, dean of Northeastern University Silicon Valley campus. That means people who have technical chops and who can collaborate, they're good communicators and they have critical thinking, she said. Rising tech leaders are becoming more concerned with how they present themselves. Victoria Hitchcock, a Bay Area style consultant who has helped tech clients who visited the White House this year, said people in the industry now request major changes to their entire Persona. In her 15 years working with tech clients, she has often had to point male founders towards simple areas to improve, like personal grooming, but they will now proactively ask how to get rid of under eye circles or for the best hair replacement program, Hitchcock said. End quote. And finally, from my I don't have a personal opinion on this, but I do try to present you every angle of a debate file from Tim Detmers, a piece that makes its point right in its title, why AGI Will Not Happen. Detmers basically argues that forecasts of imminent AGI or superintelligence ignore the physical reality of computation. The main bottleneck is moving information memory bandwidth latency, so shrinking transistors makes arithmetic cheaper while making memory relatively more constraining. Transformer style models are already close to physically efficient architectures because improvements here face diminishing returns. He claims linear capability gains require exponentially more resour mattered less when GPU efficiency rose quickly. But he argues GPUs have largely plateaued since around 2018, so further scaling will become prohibitively expensive and short lived. In that world, winner take all frontier bets look fragile and value shifts to broad deployment and adoption. He also says true AGI would need economically meaningful physical work, yet robotics data is costly and most useful robots will remain specialized, so runaway recursive self improvement is unlikely. The future is incremental progress and widespread economic diffusion of good enough AI into practical applications, not a sudden AGI breakthrough. So I think there will be a bonus episode for you this weekend. Like I did last year. I went on the Newsworthy podcast asked to count down what I thought were the top 10 tech stories of the year. If they get me the audio by tomorrow, I'll post it for you as a bonus episode. If they don't, I won't talk to you on Monday.