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AI Daily Brief — 05 January 2025

Sunday turned into the loudest day of the new year so far. Sam Altman published “Reflections,” declaring OpenAI is “now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it” and predicting that 2025 may see the first AI agents “join the workforce.” Hours later, he admitted in an X thread that OpenAI is losing money on its $200/month ChatGPT Pro plan because users are using it more than expected.

Top stories

  • Sam Altman publishes “Reflections.” The OpenAI CEO’s personal essay reviews the company’s nine-year journey, frames his November 2023 firing as “a big failure of governance by well-meaning people, myself included,” and lays down the most explicit AGI claim yet from a frontier-lab leader: “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.” He says OpenAI is “beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word.” via Sam Altman blog
  • Altman admits OpenAI is losing money on $200/mo ChatGPT Pro. “Insane thing: we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions! people use it much more than we expected,” he wrote, adding that he “personally chose the price” and “thought we would make some money.” Pro, launched in December 2024, unlocks o1 pro mode and removes rate limits on Sora and other tools. via TechCrunch
  • CES 2025 Media Days kick off in Las Vegas. CES Unveiled drew 200+ companies on Sunday evening at Mandalay Bay, the official press warm-up before NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel keynotes the next day. via CES.tech

Who shipped

Beyond Altman, frontier labs stayed quiet. Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and xAI made no dated announcements.

Open-source pulse

Still nothing fresh from Chinese labs. DeepSeek-V3 remained the most-downloaded model on the DeepSeek Hugging Face org through Sunday; the next big drop, MiniMax-01, was ten days away.

Quiet corners

arXiv’s announcement system runs Monday-Friday only — Sunday produced no new paper cycle. RTX 5090 leak chatter intensified across PCB photos, retailer listings, and reliable leakers; the official reveal was set for Monday’s keynote.

By the numbers

  • $200/mo — ChatGPT Pro tier OpenAI is now losing money on
  • 300M+ — weekly active ChatGPT users cited in “Reflections”
  • Most-mentioned lab: OpenAI
  • Notable absences: Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 5 January 2025.