Howdy. It’s Barsee again.

I hope you’re having a good week. I was clearing off my desk today and realized just how different my daily routine looks now compared to the start of the year. 2025 was a long, fast, and honestly pretty exhausting year, but it’s also been one of the most exciting.

Before we get into the ai thing, I just wanted to say a massive thank you for being here. Running this newsletter has been a highlight of my year, and knowing there's a community of you reading this every week is what keeps me 'locked in' and motivated to keep writing. This newsletter wouldn't be what it is without your support, your replies, and your time. Happy New Year in advance to all of you :)

Today’s climb through the Valley reveals:

• The 12 most impactful AI model releases of 2025

• More than 20% of YouTube's feed is now "AI slop," report finds

• Meta acquires Manus to expand its AI Agents platform

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

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PEAK OF THE DAY

The 12 most impactful AI model releases of 2025

2025 has been the most transformative year in the history of artificial intelligence. We moved beyond simple chatbots and entered the era of Agentic AI (models that don't just talk but think, reason, and execute complex workflows).

Here are the 12 models that defined the year:

The "big three" flagships

• GPT-5.2 (OpenAI) | December 11: The "Controversial Successor." While it brought "Deep Research" to the masses, it sparked heated debates on Reddit over "nerfing" and safety sanitization vs. the raw power of the 5.1 version.

• Gemini 3 Pro (Google) | November 18: The "Context King." Following the Antigravity rebrand, its stable 2-million-token window became the gold standard for "Vibe Coding" and massive document analysis.

• Claude Opus 4.5 (Anthropic) | November 24: The "CEO’s Choice." Dominating the enterprise sector, it is widely praised for its high "emotional intelligence" and reliability in high-stakes project management and complex project strategy, where you can't afford a hallucination.

The reasoning & open-source revolution

• DeepSeek-R1 | January 20: The "Silicon Valley Shock." The model that changed the economics of AI. It proved PhD-level reasoning could be achieved at a fraction of the cost, triggering the 2025 API price wars.

• Llama 4 (Meta) | April 5: The "Democratizer." Zuckerberg’s 400B+ masterpiece that allowed the open-source community and startups to run frontier-level intelligence on private hardware.

• MiniMax-M2.1 | December 23: The "Llama Whipper." A surprise viral hit on r/LocalLLaMA, this model became the go-to for users wanting high-end agentic performance in a completely offline environment.

• Mistral 3 (Mistral AI) | December 2: The "European Champion." A lean, hyper-efficient model that proved performance isn't just about size, becoming the top choice for data-sovereign enterprise deployments.

The coding & productivity powerhouses

• Claude Sonnet 4.5 / Claude Code | September 29: The "Software Engineer." The primary engine behind the 2025 boom in autonomous coding, hitting the perfect balance of speed and complex bug-fixing.

• GPT-5.1 Codex Max | November 19: The "Quota King." A Reddit favorite for its high-reasoning capabilities, paired with the most generous usage limits in the industry for a flat monthly fee.

The media & creative frontiers

• Nano Banana Pro (Google) | November 20: The "Typography Hero." The specific model that "cut everything" in AI media. It finally solved the text-in-image problem, rendering perfect signage and professional layouts that previously required manual design.

• Sora 2 (OpenAI) | September 30: The "World Simulator." The public release that mastered physics. It moved AI video from "cool clips" to realistic cinematic generation, where objects interact and break according to real-world logic.

• Veo 3.1 (Google DeepMind) | October 15: The "Cinematic Pro." Favored by professional VFX houses for its "Directorial Control," allowing editors to manipulate camera angles and lighting within the generated frame.

The big takeaway:

2025 marked the "Industrialization of Cognition," a definitive pivot where intelligence transitioned from a high-cost experimental novelty to a scalable background utility. The most significant catalyst was the 90% collapse in the cost of complex reasoning, triggered by the efficiency-first architectures of DeepSeek-R1 and Llama 4. This economic realignment has effectively closed the "Chatbot Era," giving rise to an Agentic Economy where value is measured by autonomous task completion rather than conversational flair.

2025 AI year in review: The honors:

Winner of the Year:

Gemini 3 Pro (Google) While every model on this list is a giant, Gemini 3 Pro takes the crown. By merging a massive 2-million-token context window with native "Agentic" capabilities, it became the first model that didn't just feel like a tool, but an operating system. Whether for coding, research, or video analysis, it was the most reliable "all-rounder" of 2025.

Biggest Surprise:

DeepSeek-R1 The "Silicon Valley Shock." Nobody expected a lean Chinese lab to release a model that matched Western reasoning benchmarks at 1/10th the cost. It effectively broke the monopoly on high-end intelligence and forced every major US company to rethink its pricing and efficiency strategies overnight.

THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ More than 20% of YouTube's feed is now "AI slop," report finds

New research from video editing company Kapwing shows that more than 20 percent of YouTube videos recommended to brand-new users are low-effort AI-generated “slop.” Kapwing created a fresh account and found that 21 percent of the first 500 recommendations were auto-generated clips made to farm views. The top slop channel was India’s Bandar Apna Dost, an animated monkey with more than 2 billion views and an estimated 4.25 million dollars in yearly ad revenue. South Korea led total slop viewership, followed by Pakistan and the United States. The findings suggest users either cannot tell or simply do not care, keeping the incentive to produce this content alive.

2/ Meta acquires Manus to expand its AI Agents platform

Meta has acquired Manus, a startup known for building powerful general-purpose AI agents that can run research, automation, and multi-step workflows on their own. Manus’s system has processed more than 147 trillion tokens and helped create over 80 million virtual computers, giving both individuals and enterprises a reliable way to automate complex tasks. The service will stay live and continue offering subscriptions while Meta gradually brings Manus’s technology into its wider platforms. Industry analysts say the deal strengthens Meta’s position in AI productivity, since Manus delivers the kind of dependable end-to-end automation that many rivals still struggle to achieve.

TRENDING TOOLS

• Adobe just brought three of its industry-leading apps (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Adobe Acrobat) directly into ChatGPT *

• Claude Opus 4.5 > The best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use

• Gambo AI > It turns your one-paragraph game idea into a playable game

• Exa > It lets you search the web and pull back clean page text/summaries so you can build answers with sources

• Prophetic > Induce a lucid dream

• Keak > An AI agent capable of continuously improving your website

• Yume > A magical dream journal app

• Tavus > Build with real-time digital twins that speak, see, and hear

• Pom > Scans product ingredients to identify harmful substances and provides detailed breakdowns of each ingredient

• Browser use > Make websites accessible for AI agents

• AI Journal > Reveal hidden patterns and insights to improve your self-awareness and stay focused on what truly matters

• Twelve Labs Marengo > Search and understand your videos with AI

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THINK PIECES / BRAIN BOOST

• 2025 LLM year in review

• Seven big predictions for tech in 2026

• The real reason robots shouldn’t look like humans

• New Chinese rules target AI addiction, emotional influence, and security risks

• Jevons paradox for knowledge work

• A definition of AGI

• The economics of AI

• Geoffrey Hinton predicts machines will outpace humans in more workplaces next year

• Will AI steal your job? No. It will allegedly make 78 million more jobs than it steals by 2030

• 50 ready-to-customize "Claude Skills," essentially structured workflows that train Anthropic's AI to execute specific tasks

• OpenAI publishes a blog post on why language models hallucinate

• CES 2026 is set to showcase AI wearables, trifold phones, and robots that might finally feel useful

• AI minted more than 50 new billionaires in 2025

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU

Thank you for reading today’s edition. That’s all for today’s issue.

💡 Help me get better and suggest new ideas at [email protected] or @heyBarsee

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