🗿 OpenAI releases the closest thing to AGI yet

In partnership with

GM. OpenAI launched the closest thing yet to AGI for its final shipmas surprise. It’s called o3.

Without Further Ado. ☕ *knuckle cracks* ☕ Let’s get into it.

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The deets on OpenAI’s new release

Sooo why o3 instead of o2?

Apparently, OpenAI skipped o2 to avoid a trademark war with British telecom giant O2.

What makes o3 special?

o3 doesn’t just spit out answers — it pauses, thinks (yes, literally), and self-checks. This “private chain of thought” approach lets it reason through problems step by step, making it a champ in fields like physics, science, and advanced mathematics.

It also has adjustable brainpower – you can tweak its thinking time. Choose low, medium, or high compute settings to balance speed and accuracy.

Benchmarks

• American Invitational Mathematics Exam: 96.7% (missed one question)

• GPQA Diamond (graduate-level science): 87.7%

• SWE-Bench Verified (programming tasks): Outperforms its predecessor by 22.8 points

• Codeforces Rating: 2727 (top 0.8% of human coders)

Potential AGI Candidate?

On ARC-AGI, a benchmark measuring adaptability beyond training data, o3 scored a 87.5% at high compute. In other words, it’s getting really really good at learning new tricks.

But we aren’t at singularity (yet).

One setback, there’s a latency tax—it takes longer to respond than standard models. Also, OpenAI isn’t releasing this to the masses just yet. o3-mini previews start today, with full o3 rollouts expected by late January.

Then there’s the safety question: o1 already raised eyebrows for its sneaky behavior. OpenAI says o3 uses “deliberative alignment” to stay in line with its safety goals, but we won’t know how well that works until third-party red teams take a crack at it.

Other AI companies are moving in stride with OpenAI’s reasoning model. Google’s Gemini, Alibaba’s Qwen, and DeepSeek’s R1 are just a few of the rivals jumping into the “thinking AI” race.

The brute-force scaling of older models has hit a wall, and reasoning capabilities could be the next big unlock. Still, these models are expensive, complex, and ultimately a gamble, kinda like the early Internet days.

OpenAI’s o3 drop coincides with the departure of Alec Radford, one of the brains behind the original GPT series. He’s leaving to pursue independent research, marking the end of an era for OpenAI.

TL;DR

• OpenAI unveils o3 and o3-mini, their latest reasoning models

• These models “think” before responding, leading to higher accuracy but slower replies

• o3 sets records in advanced math, coding, and adaptability benchmarks.

• Questions remain about cost, safety, and whether reasoning models are truly the future

Nike prioritizes brand building over performance marketing (sigh, finally)

Back in August, a 25+ year brand executive at Nike wrote a lengthy op-ed about the shortcomings of Nike’s brand strategy over the past few years.

Welp, it might of been a sign of things to come. Marketing Dive just released a piece entitled “Nike shifts more performance dollars to brand building as part of reset”

I’ve long been saying brands need to prioritize brand-building over data. Just saying.

Anyway, his criticism called out a symptom of a larger issue among Fortune 500s... brand marketing and narrative storytelling have taken a backseat to performance-led marketing, data-driven insights, and loyalty programs.

It’s good to see Nike making a material change, and I expect more global brands to follow suit. We may be entering a new golden age of branded content and advertising.

In a world where technology can make finding the right customer (or finding the right brand) an automated, inevitable process, brand awareness, and perception become the most important KPIs. They’re the messy human things that don’t scale.

Optimizing customer loyalty, hyper-targeting users, and maximizing retention and engagement through retail innovation can be a revenue strategy. But it’s not a long-term growth strategy.

Nike hasn't produced a historic brand campaign since 2018. They’re losing their sparkle (the numbers prove it), and they know it. Global brands operating in the "sea of sameness" must stand out with innovation and creative storytelling to drive a difficult-to-measure but crucial KPI… it’s called brand equity.

You can't precisely measure how humans feel when they see your brand. But it's real, it influences decision-making, and it drives demand.

Why brand matters

Alo Yoga isn't an inherently better product than Lululemon, but Alo is starting to capture market share. Why? Because they target local events and creators aligned with their customers more aggressively than Lulu.

There is no direct value exchange from hosting a yoga event in the Hamptons or Ibiza. If the marketing team had to justify every dollar spent to drive quarterly profit, it would be nearly impossible to prove.

But over time, Alo will certainly win the hearts of athleisure enthusiasts because they are active and present. Their brand has a heartbeat.

Brands struggle to inspire

More global brands should wake up before it's too late and recognize that staying "lean" on marketing by enhancing customer loyalty and optimizing programmatic advertising is not a strategy that can last forever.

You have to be willing to take a stance and stick your foot in the ground and build something that doesn't just encourage repeat behavior but inspires people and encourages them to break from their routine. Try something bold and new.

Nike seems willing to try that.

I predict a brand marketing renaissance. As technology helps us solve the unused data problem, marketers will drop data-chasing and become full-time storytellers. Human creativity will be the most in-demand skill set.

What we’re reading this week

• OpenAI announces new o3 models

• Apple in talks with Tencent, ByteDance to roll out AI features in China, sources say

• Nvidia clears regulatory hurdle to acquire Run:ai

• Apple urged to axe AI feature after false headline

• Crypto Market Sees $1.2 Billion in Liquidations as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, XRP and Solana Face Double-Digit Losses

• World's first Bitcoin nation scales back crypto dream

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