Daily AI Brief — GPT‑5.1, NVIDIA Blackwell, Baidu multimodal & more (Nov 16, 2025)
Here are the top AI developments from the last 24 hours, summarized so you can scan the landscape quickly. Sources include recent reporting and research summaries; follow the links for full articles.
1. OpenAI launches GPT‑5.1 (Instant & Thinking)
OpenAI released a new GPT‑5.1 family including a fast “Instant” model and a higher‑reasoning “Thinking” variant. The updates reportedly improve instruction following and reasoning while increasing “intelligence per dollar” efficiency for many workloads.
2. NVIDIA’s Blackwell dominates MLPerf
NVIDIA’s Blackwell architecture reportedly swept the latest MLPerf Training benchmarks, demonstrating leading training speeds across a range of workloads — a reminder that hardware is a key competitive axis as models scale.
3. Baidu unveils a new multimodal model
Baidu announced an open‑source multimodal model (ERNIE‑4.5‑VL‑28B‑A3B‑Thinking) that claims strong performance while activating only a subset of parameters during inference. This follows the broader trend of efficient, large multimodal architectures.
4. Google Research releases Nested Learning method
Researchers at Google introduced “Nested Learning,” a technique aimed at reducing catastrophic forgetting when models are trained on sequential tasks. The work is part of ongoing efforts to make continual learning more robust.
5. Microsoft forms a Superintelligence team
Microsoft announced an internal MAI Superintelligence team focused on building advanced AI systems for domains like medicine and energy, signaling increased corporate investment in high‑impact research projects.
6. AI data center energy & sustainability concerns
As companies race to expand AI compute, analysts are raising questions about the extent to which the data center boom will be powered by renewables and how infrastructure demands will affect local grids and sustainability goals.
7. Market & industry notes
- Some new platforms are bundling long‑term access deals to AI services — watch for consumer and enterprise packaging experiments.
- Analysts note continuing disruption across major tech firms as competition in AI models, hardware, and cloud services intensifies.
Quick links to recent coverage (open in new tabs): TechCrunch — AI data center energy, ThirdRuntime (aggregator), AI News Briefs.
Note: these items were aggregated from multiple reports in the last 24 hours and may be updated as companies post official details. If you want a deeper dive on any single item (benchmarks, model specs, or sustainability data), tell me which one and I’ll expand it into a full post.
Discussion: Which of these developments matters most to you — model advances, hardware benchmarks, or the sustainability and infrastructure side of AI growth?