From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet

On Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the video generation tool that it launched at the end of 2024, and centered in a massive licensing deal with Disney only a few months ago. The Wall Street Journal reported the move earlier, saying that OpenAI boss Sam Altman had informed staff that both the TikTok-like Sora app and API access for developers would be discontinued, with no plans to roll the feature into ChatGPT as had previously been rumored.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, as a result, the deal Disney announced in December, saying it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, license its characters for use within Sora, and send AI-generated videos into Disney Plus, is also coming to an end. On the same day, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that the company had raised an additional $10 billion from investors, as the company moves toward a potential IPO, on top of the $110 billion fundraising round announced in February.

Ever watch a TV ad and wonder, “How did this get approved?” Today, Google has not one but two new ad spots for its six-month-old Pixel 10 phones, and… let’s just say they may not come across as intended.

First, there’s “With 100x Zoom,” an ad that appears to suggest that if a vacation rental company lies to you about the view from your hotel room, you should lie to all your friends and family, too!

Google announced on Tuesday that all users in the US will now have access to its Personal Intelligence feature, which lets you connect various Google apps to provide context for Gemini’s responses and suggestions. Access was previously limited to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers. Now, free-tier users in the US can also use Personal Intelligence through AI Mode in Search, Gemini in Chrome, and the Gemini app. However, the feature is currently only available to users on personal Google accounts, not business, enterprise, or education users.

Personal Intelligence uses data from connected apps, like YouTube, Google Photos, and Gmail, to automatically personalize Gemini’s responses without requiring you to manually add extra context to your prompts. With the feature turned on, Gemini might offer shopping recommendations based on items you’ve recently purchased or give you tech troubleshooting advice based on device info Gemini already has. When Allison Johnson tried it earlier this year, she said that with personalization, “Gemini can analyze my interests and make some pretty good guesses about what I’d be interested in; it’s the details where AI gets lost.”

For months, Grammarly has been using the identities of real people (including us) for its “Expert Review” AI suggestions without getting their permission, and now it’s facing a lawsuit from one of the journalists included, as previously reported by Wired. The class-action complaint filed by journalist Julia Angwin on Wednesday alleges that Superhuman violated the “experts’” privacy and publicity rights by breaking laws against using someone’s identity for commercial purposes without their consent.

Angwin says she found out her identity was used by way of Casey Newton, who is also one of the experts that The Verge uncovered being used by Grammarly when we tested the feature this week. Several current Verge staff members popped up attached to Grammarly’s AI-generated suggestions, too, including editor-in-chief Nilay Patel.

Superhuman says it has disabled Grammarly’s “expert review” AI feature that said its edit suggestions were “inspired by” real writers, including our editor-in-chief and other Verge staff members.

“After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review as we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all,” Ailian Gan, Superhuman’s director of product management, said in a statement to The Verge. “Based on the feedback we’ve received, we clearly missed the mark. We are sorry and will do things differently going forward.”

If you want to win in AI — and I mean win in the biggest, most lucrative, most shape-the-world-in-your-image kind of way — you have to do a bunch of hard things simultaneously. You need to have a model that is unquestionably one of the best on the market. You need the nearly infinite resources required to continue to improve that model and deploy it at massive scale. You need at least one AI-based product that lots of people use, and ideally more than one. And you need access to as much of your users’ other data — their personal information, their online activity, even the files on their computer — as you can possibly get.

Each one of these elements is complex and competitive; there’s a reason OpenAI CEO Sam Altman keeps shouting about how he needs trillions of dollars in compute alone. But Google is the one company that appears to have all of the pieces already in order. Over the last year, and even in the last few days, the company has made moves that suggest it is ready to be the biggest and most impactful force in AI.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri is closing out 2025 with a 20-images-deep dive into what a new era of “infinite synthetic content” means as it all becomes harder and harder to distinguish from reality, and the old, more personal Instagram feed that he says has been “dead” for years. Last year, The Verge’s Sarah Jeong wrote that “...the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do,” and Mosseri eventually concurs:

You can read the full text from his slideshow at the bottom of this post, but according to Mosseri, the evolution required of Instagram and other platforms is that “We need to build the best creative tools. Label AI-generated content and verify authentic content. Surface credibility signals about who’s posting. Continue to improve ranking for originality.”

Look, I’m as fed up as the next guy with AI chatbots stuffed into every app. I don’t want to brainstorm coverage options with an LLM every time I renew my car insurance. I’d much rather message a human than a robot to pester FedEx about my missing package. But I have found one scenario where AI is actually pretty great: real estate.

I need to confess something: I’m a Redfin looky-loo. A Zillow zealot. Not because I am actually shopping for a new home. With these interest rates? God, no. But I am perpetually window-shopping for a new home — partly out of nosiness, and partly because I like imagining what life might look like in a different arrangement of bedrooms and bathrooms.

The recently-rumored AI partnership between Spotify and the major record labels is now a reality. The streaming service announced today that it’s entering into an agreement with Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin, and Believe to develop “responsible AI products.” Unfortunately, your guess is as good as ours as to what exactly that means.

Spotify didn’t detail any specific products in the works but said it was building a “state-of-the-art generative AI research lab and product team focused on developing technologies that reflect our principles and create breakthrough experiences for fans and artists.”

Two weeks ago, record company Hallwood Media signed a deal with Telisha “Nikki” Jones after negotiations that purportedly included an offer of $3 million, Billboard reported. Jones is a Mississippi-based lyricist behind the R&B artist “Xania Monet” whose most popular song on Spotify racked up over 1 million listens, and whose Reels regularly top 100,000 views on Instagram – despite her likeness, vocals, and music being AI-generated.

Multiple copyright experts speaking with The Verge have been quite clear: the law is not at all settled but generally one cannot copyright AI-generated works by themselves without human intervention, but you may be able to secure copyright where there are human-made expressive elements, which in this case are the lyrics. So, what exactly is Hallwood Media buying? What can they license? What does this mean for the future of music as a sellable product? The more questions we asked, the more it became evident that we’re facing a cultural shift in the wake of the flood of AI-generated content. The law is just trying to keep up.

Influencers and content creators are many things beyond their public personas. All but the biggest figures likely do some combination of the following jobs themselves: content moderator, video editor, photographer, social media strategist, script writer, and idea generator. What if they could outsource much of that work to AI? And what if it were the social media platforms themselves that provided them with the tools to do so?

At the Made on YouTube event, held Tuesday in New York, the company launched a slew of new AI features aimed at content creators, many of which focus on all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into a video. Unlike previous tools — like an AI background music generator or tools that create AI photos and videos — the new ones are largely content strategy features, marketed as helping creators reach new audiences (and more effectively get in front of their existing base).

Eddy Cue deserves a raise.

As the executive overseeing Apple’s services division, he’s highly incentivized to protect the tens of billions of dollars a year that Google pays to be the default search engine in Safari. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep thinking about it,” he said from the witness stand during Google’s antitrust trial earlier this year.

Welcome to Decoder! I’m Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today, I’m talking to a very special guest: Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI.

While Sam Altman is definitely the public face of the company, Nick has been leading ChatGPT’s development since the very beginning. It’s now the fastest-growing software product of all time, reaching 700 million people each week.

After the backlash to replacing its 4o model with GPT-5, OpenAI will no longer get rid of old models without a heads up.

“In retrospect, not continuing to offer 4o, at least in the interim, was a miss,” Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, said on Tuesday. In an interview with me for an upcoming episode of Decoder, he said it was surprising to see the “level of attachment” people had to 4o. “It’s not just change that is difficult for folks, it’s also the fact that people can have such a strong feeling about the personality of a model.”

You just want to search your archived photos, instead of interacting with an AI assistant.

Inside the app, tap the Google account button at top-right, then go to Photos settings > Preferences > Gemini features in Photos, and turn off either “Search with Ask Photos” or “Use Gemini in Photos”.