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In a recent Reddit AMA (ask me anything), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, along with some other top OpenAI executives, dropped a number of hints about the company’s future, and what to expect from ChatGPT next year.

Firstly, when asked if there would be a ChatGPT-5 Altman doubled down on his “fake news” response on X recently to an article talking of its imminent release: “We have some very good releases coming later this year! Nothing that we are going to call GPT-5, though”, he replied. The phrasing “this year” does indicate that a new LLM could be released by OpenAI very soon though.

Agents are coming

It's been a busy week for OpenAI, with the release of Advanced Voice mode on the desktop app versions of ChatGPT and a new ChatGPT search, which even challenges Google. When asked about the value of the recently released ChatGPT search compared to traditional search engines, like Google, Altman was enthusiastic: “For many queries, I find it to be a way faster/easier way to get the information I'm looking for. I think we'll see this especially for queries that require more complex research. I also look forward to a future where a search query can dynamically render a custom web page in response!”

When asked about the next update to Dall-E 3, the image generator that’s part of ChatGPT, Altman was non committal: “The next update will be worth the wait! But we don't have a release plan yet." So it doesn’t look like much will be happening on the image generation front for a while.

ChatGPT search is the latest addition to ChatGPT. (Image credit: OpenAI) Real intelligence

One area where ChatGPT is being challenged by its rivals is in AI that can perform tasks autonomously. We’ve seen Google make inroads into this area with its Jarvis AI. When asked if ChatGPT will be able to perform tasks on its own, Altman replied “IMHO this is going to be a big theme in 2025”, which indicates the direction OpenAI will be taking next year.

Referring again to autonomous AI, when asked what the next big breakthrough for ChatGPT would be, Altman replied: “We will have better and better models, but i think the thing that will feel like the next giant breakthrough will be agents”. Agents are autonomous AI bots that can perform tasks for you.

Perhaps the most interesting comment from Altman was about the future of AGI - artificial general intelligence. Seen by many as the ‘real’ AI, this is an artificial intelligence model that could rival or even exceed human intelligence. Altman has previously declared that we could have AGI within "a few thousand days".

When asked by a Reddit user whether AGI is achievable with known hardware or it will take something entirely different, Altman replied: “We believe it is achievable with current hardware.”

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AMD has confirmed it's working closely with Activision to bring the FSR 4 upscaling tool to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in 2025 - further clarifying the purported shift to AI for FSR.

This comes from Team Red’s Vice President, Jack Huynh, in a video that unveils the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D (spoiler: the rumors and spec leaks we reported earlier this week were accurate). In addition to the new chip, Huynh confirmed AMD’s plans to optimize FSR 3.1 further in Black Ops 6. Following this, the AMD VP mentioned a collaboration with Activision to bring the ‘next generation of ML-based FSR’ to the long-running shooter franchise next year.

We’re still waiting to hear more about how the newly AI-driven FSR 4 will work - especially versus DLSS and now PSSR, both of which notably use AI for resolution upscaling, while AMD has avoided the use of AI for FSR thus far. According to Huynh, handheld gaming PCs will enjoy a significant battery life improvement stemming from AI-based frame interpolation.

While this could drastically improve power efficiency for handhelds, it’s also potentially great news for desktop PC gamers who use mid-range GPUs. Fluid Motion Frames (AMD’s frame-gen software) has already improved smoothness and reduced latency across multiple games, and with AMD fully focusing on machine learning for FSR 4, we can expect a performance leap in both FMF and the resolution upscaling tool itself.

Will this help AMD GPUs compete with Nvidia’s?

It’s clear that frame generation and AI upscaling are becoming prominent factors in producing smooth gaming experiences on PC. Nvidia’s DLSS has consistently outperformed AMD’s FSR, which is more than likely one of the RTX 4000 series’ pull factors for PC gamers (since the next-gen DLSS 3 is only available on RTX 4000 cards).

With a new generation of upscaling tech on the horizon, this is a great opportunity for Team Red to compete in the GPU market - high-end GPUs are no longer its focus, so FSR 4 may be the savior needed to lock in strong but affordable performance for its mid-range and budget cards.

If AMD’s leaked CES 2025 lineup is accurate, we could see the brand put up a great fight within the GPU department but also deliver a complete landslide across multiple other next-gen hardware arenas… watch this space, folks.

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• AMD Strix Halo leak suggests flagship mobile chip with integrated GPU to perhaps outdo an RTX 4070 – but there’s a catch

The upcoming Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro gaming phone will break the record for the highest display refresh rate reached by a globally released phone, according to a new rumor.

Notable leaker Digital Chat Station shared a Weibo post on October 31 claiming that they had got hands-on with the upcoming phone, adding that it’s the “first to launch [with] a 185Hz extremely high refresh rate screen”.

If this tipoff is true, the ROG Phone 9 Pro will boast the fastest refresh rate found on a globally released smartphone.

Note the “globally released” prefix, though – the actual fastest refreshing phone screen is found on the Japan-exclusive Sharp Aquos Zero2, which comes equipped with a blazing-fast 240Hz panel.

Nevertheless, 185Hz is nothing to shake a stick at – the current industry standard for flagship phones is 120Hz, with some 144Hz models from the likes of Xiaomi. Apple, on the other hand, still fits the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus with a measly 60Hz display.

For those not in the know, Hz is short for 'Hertz', which in turn means how many times per second a display can refresh the image presented. A higher number means objects on screen will appear to move more smoothly.

By any current measure, 185Hz is extremely fast. It tracks that Digital Chat Station suggests the ROG Phone 9 Pro will feature the best heat dissipation efficiency presently possible, though we haven’t seen any metrics to support this claim nor any details on which tech enables it.

Asus has a track record of making phones with very high-refresh rate displays, which adds some credibility to this rumor. The current-generation Asus ROG Phone 8 sports a 165Hz panel, for example.

Digital Chat Station also shared some other potential specs for the upcoming ROG Phone 9 Pro, suggesting the phone will be IP68 certified and feature a centrally-positioned Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, a placement likely intended to assist with heat distribution.

The Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro and standard ROG Phone 9 are due to launch on November 19, following the reveal of the two phones last month, and we expect that both phones will have a chance of joining our list of the best gaming phones.

Until then, most of the above is based on rumors, so be sure to keep up with our Asus phones coverage for the latest official updates as we hear them.

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AMD’s Strix Point Halo chips have been the subject of a major leak underlining the potential power of these processors, and when they’re expected to arrive – which isn’t in the near future for gaming laptops, sadly.

Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID) on YouTube had the scoop on these Strix Halo APUs, and as per an apparently official render leaked from AMD showing a chip, the processors will be called the Ryzen AI Max Pro series. (A bit of ‘kitchen sink’ style naming there, with an element of one-upmanship in terms of the models seen in Apple’s M series silicon, no doubt).

We’re given spec details too, which mirror what we’ve heard from the rumor mill previously – namely that the flagship Strix Halo CPU will have 16 cores, and the integrated graphics will be RDNA 3.5 (refreshed RDNA 3) with a mighty 40 CUs.

This means that the flagship chip will be around the same level of power as a discrete RTX 4070 laptop GPU, at the least, so the integrated graphics might even outdo the RTX 4070. Let that sink in for a moment – remember, this is integrated graphics. We’re also apparently looking at a TDP of 120W.

We can expect to see Strix Halo launched at CES 2025 – as already rumored, and AMD will seemingly have a pile of stuff to reveal at the show – and workstation laptops with Ryzen AI Max Pro chips are going to be first on the shelves in Q1 of 2025.

After that, gaming laptops will arrive with Strix Halo in the second quarter, although we may see a smattering of those notebooks in Q1. MLID sounds pretty sure that most of the gaming launches will be in Q2, however, with creators and other heavyweight users being targeted for the initial silicon here. This makes sense in terms of poaching MacBook sales with these ‘Max Pro’ processors, of course.

A third outlet for Strix Halo might eventually be APUs produced for small form-factor PCs, depending on how successful the chips are in laptops (and we guess how much resources Team Red has behind them, too).

Analysis: Concerns about gaming laptops

These Strix Halo processors are set to be nothing less than a revelation for thin-and-light gaming laptops (and of course, workstations as mentioned – which will be the priority for AMD, perhaps to the annoyance of gamers, but there are plentiful profits to be had in the world of svelte MacBook-style laptops for creatives and other power users).

As MLID points out, though, the slight snag is that by the time Ryzen AI Max Pro notebooks pitch up, we will likely have a range of new laptop GPUs from Nvidia. With next-gen Blackwell GPUs rumored to be a considerable step up in power – we may see these at CES 2025 too – the comparison between Strix Halo’s integrated graphics and discrete laptop video cards isn’t going to be quite as striking.

Of course, this means at Strix Halo launch time, we’ll likely be looking at the equal of the RTX 5060 mobile, rather than the RTX 4070 as mentioned in the comparison drawn by the leak – and that doesn’t sound quite as eye-opening. However, remember that the sort of laptops Strix Halo can be packed into will not play host to a discrete Nvidia GPU and related cooling, which will require a bigger chassis.

In short, these are still some heavyweight APUs to look forward to that are going to pack quite a punch for more compact notebooks. If anything, the worry for us might be that workstations are favored over gaming laptops to more of a degree than we’d ideally like – we shall see. It’s possible that more modest variants of the Strix Halo CPUs will be the engines of gaming laptops, and as VideoCardz, which spotted the leak, also points out, most of the spillage (benchmarks) around Ryzen AI Max Pro thus far has related to workstations.

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Amazon has reported an 11% growth in revenue in its latest quarterly results as profits continue to soar for the ecommerce and cloud giant, which is teetering towards a $2 trillion valuation.

The strong growth is largely down to the company's cloud computing succes, with AWS reporting a 19% year-over-year growth in revenue.

At $27.5 billion, Amazon Web Services’ third-quarter revenue equates to nearly a fifth (17.3%) of the company’s entire revenue.

AWS pushes Amazon revenue

Operating income for AWS reached a new milestone of $10.45 billion, accounting for more than three-fifths of the overall company’s profit, with an operating margin of 38.1%, the highest in a decade.

In the same period, Google Cloud revenues increased 35%, marking much healthier growth than that of Amazon’s, however Google’s cloud division revenue is only $11.4 billion – less than half of AWS’.

Since Amazon’s previous earnings call, AWS has launched a series of new genAI products, including its Rufus shopping assistant in Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and the UK; AI Shopping Guides; Project Amelia for sellers; and video generation and live image capabilities for advertisers.

It also added Anthropic’s upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Meta’s Llama 3.2, Mistral Large 2, and multiple Stability AI models to Bedrock and signed agreements with global companies like Capital One, T-Mobile and Toyota.

“We’ve seen significant reacceleration of AWS growth for the last four quarters," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy summarized on the company’s earnings call.

While cloud shows no signs of slowing down, Amazon is also anticipating growth across its ecommerce business in the next three months. The busy festive period, driven by a handful of major consumer sales, will be met by the temporary hiring of seasonal staff globally.

Jassy added that “there’s so much more coming” including “over 100 new cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities,” which will be shared at the upcoming re:Invent conference in December 2024.

Via Geekwire

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• Amazon is working to get Alexa to ChatGPT levels
• The launch was originally planned for early 2024
• Bugs, hallucinations, and simple tasks are still issues

Amazon Alexa was originally launched alongside the very first Amazon Echo speaker back on November 6, 2014 – but as the voice assistant approaches its 10th birthday, it's struggling to keep up with next-gen AI bots like ChatGPT and Gemini.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, "technical challenges" mean that Alexa's upcoming upgrade has now been pushed back to 2025. Originally, a beta version of the updated bot was planned to arrive earlier this year, Bloomberg says.

There was also apparently a plan to unveil Alexa 2.0 alongside the new Kindles that appeared last month, but again the launch got pushed back. Now, some unspecified point in 2025 is the target deadline.

With the likes of Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and many other bots pushing their way into every aspect of digital life, Amazon knows that it's lagging behind – Alexa has effectively been overtaken by its rivals.

Bugs and hallucinations

There was a plan to launch Alexa 2.0 alongside the latest Kindles (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

There's no doubt that a generative AI upgrade for Alexa is a challenge. The assistant is currently available on around half a billion devices, and rolling out an update for all of them isn't a straightforward task.

Bloomberg's report says the souped up version of Alexa in testing still has a tendency to "drone on with irrelevant or superfluous information", while also struggling with basic tasks, such as switching on smart lights.

While there has been some progress towards a ChatGPT-style Alexa, the sources speaking to Bloomberg say there's a long way to go, with bugs and hallucinations causing problems. There has been talk that Amazon could get help from another AI model, in the same way that Apple has supercharged Siri with ChatGPT.

There's also a lack of a "compelling vision" according to insiders, with "management bloat" around Alexa another issue. So, even if you've got one of the best Alexa speakers, it looks like it's going to be a while before you get one of the best AI bots built into it.

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Eight years on from its initial launch, Amazon has introduced multi-factor authentication (MFA) to its business cloud-hosted email service, WorkMail.

Better late than never appears to be the justification behind the near-decade delay, especially for one of the most basic forms of identity verification that has been standard practice for several years now.

However there are still hurdles to enabling MFA for WorkMail, as it will not be enabled by default and system administrators will have to manually add each user to the AWS Identity Center.

MFA at last

Amazon launched WorkMail as a competitor to Microsoft Exchange, and over the past years has built a modest customer base but still struggles to compete despite many businesses migrating to Amazon provided services and continuing to use Microsoft Exchange.

In late 2023, Amazon signed a $1 billion deal with Microsoft to provide Microsoft 365 licenses to one million of Amazon’s corporate and frontline workers, including Outlook.

In a response to questioning by TheRegister, an Amazon spokesperson said MFA was available for WorkMail through other methods, stating, “It was previously possible to configure MFA via AWS Directory Service, but setup was complex for customers and it only supported AWS-managed Microsoft ADs.”

“WorkMail continues to adhere to general security updates consistent with AWS standards, such as moving TLS minimum versions to 1.2, expanding audit logging support, and providing guidance to customers [on] how to implement overarching protections against a wide range of potential compromises,” the spokesperson said.

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• Benchmark results for Apple’s M4 Pro chip have appeared on Geekbench
• They suggest the M4 Pro’s performance tops the Mac Pro’s M2 Ultra
• It’s an impressive result for Apple’s brand-new M4-series Macs

When Apple revealed its new M4 Macs, it generally contrasted their performance to the M1 and M3 chips that came before. Those comparisons showed a fairly impressive step up, but a new Geekbench benchmark has shown that the M4 Pro chip can square up against Apple’s powerful Mac Pro – and absolutely dominate the encounter.

The Geekbench result shows the M4 Pro achieving a single-core score of 3925 and a multi-core result of 22669. The machine running the rest was configured with 48GB of memory and that fact, combined with its model identifier number of Mac16,7, suggests that it was a MacBook Pro.

Likewise, there are plenty of results for an M4 Pro Mac identified as Mac16,11, which is likely to be the Mac mini.

One example on Geekbench sees this machine score 3618 for single-core performance and 22113 on the multi-core test. Like Mac16,7, this computer was outfitted with 48GB of memory.

What those scores mean

(Image credit: Apple)

Now, what do these scores mean? Well, let’s compare them to the latest Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra chip. There are a lot of results for this machine on Geekbench, but the most recent one sees that Mac score 2868 for single-core performance and 22065 for multi-core output.

That means that the M4 Pro pulls ahead in the multi-core test and totally demolishes the M2 Ultra in terms of single-core performance. That’s all the more remarkable because of the price you’ll pay to get each of those chips.

The Mac Pro starts at $6,999 / £7,199 / AU$11,999 for a model configured with an M2 Ultra chip with a 24-core CPU, a 60-core GPU and 64GB of memory. In contrast, you can get a Mac mini with the M4 Pro chip with a 12-core CPU, a 16-core GPU and 24GB of memory for a mere $1,399 / £1,399 / AU$2,199. Boost it up to the same 48GB of memory that the benchmarked model had and you’ll still only pay $1,799 / £1,799 / AU$2,799, yet get far better performance than the Mac Pro.

It leaves the Mac Pro in something of an awkward spot. While it will eventually migrate to the M4 series of chips, that’s not expected to happen until the second half of 2025, potentially forcing interested buyers to wait a year for updates.

While the Mac Pro has plenty of its own strengths – far superior expansion options and vast memory capacity being two of them – it’s not a good look to have its performance overshadowed by Apple’s own machines, all for a fraction of the cost.

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We only just got Android 15, but rather than having to wait until late 2025 for Android 16, Google has confirmed that its next major software release will land in the second quarter of 2025 – so somewhere between April and June.

The company revealed as much on its Android Developers blog, claiming that it’s releasing Android 16 earlier than usual so that more devices can get the latest Android release earlier.

In other words, phones like the Samsung Galaxy S25, for example, will probably get Android 16 within a few months of launch, rather than having to wait six months or more. The likes of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, and Google Pixel 10 will surely ship with Android 16, too.

(Image credit: Google)

Interestingly, Google says that there will also be a “minor” Android release in the final three months of 2025. This will include feature updates, optimizations, and bug fixes, but won’t include any app-impacting behavior changes.

The company hasn’t actually named either of these updates, but as the only “major” Android release in 2025, the first of these will surely be Android 16, while the second sounds like it might be Android 16.1.

On top of that, we’ll see “incremental updates” in the first and third quarters of 2025.

Smaller updates, more often

With most of the highest profile Android phones landing in the first half of the year, it makes sense to launch new versions of Android at around the same time or shortly after, but this change does mean that Google will have less time to develop Android 16 than it's typically allowed for.

That, in turn, might mean that this is a smaller update than we've seen from previous years, though that’s just speculation for now. And even if it is, the release of Android 16.1 (or whatever it ends up being called) later in the year should bring additional changes.

So, if Google sticks with this approach in future years, it could simply mean that there’s a more regular drip-feed of Android improvements throughout each year, rather than a single massive overhaul once a year. We're certainly on board with that approach.

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