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Outpoll Weekly Recap: AI (November 17 – 23, 2025)

Outpoll Weekly Recap: AI (November 17 – 23, 2025)

4 hours ago7 min read

This week in AI felt less like a steady march of progress and more like a sudden, decisive leap, with the open-source community landing a staggering blow against the walled gardens of Big Tech. The release of 'Aether-7B', a 7-billion parameter model that handily outperforms giants like GPT-4 on several reasoning benchmarks, has sent shockwaves through the ecosystem, proving that the relentless scaling of parameters isn't the only path to intelligence.Trained on a novel, synthetically curated dataset, Aether's architecture suggests a fundamental shift towards data quality over brute data quantity, a principle many of us in the research community have long advocated. Prediction markets, ever the canary in the coal mine, went haywire; shares for 'Open-source AI market share to exceed 50% by 2027' skyrocketed from 22% to 65% in 48 hours, while 'Major AI lab acquisition of an open-source startup before Q2 2026' saw a 40-point jump.Concurrently, the EU's provisional agreement on the AI Act's final text, with its surprisingly nuanced approach to open-source development and foundational models, has created a regulatory tailwind, causing 'EU to become global AI regulatory leader' contracts to surge. This regulatory clarity, combined with the Aether breakthrough, is catalyzing a Cambrian explosion of specialized models.We're witnessing the early stages of a true paradigm shift: the democratization of frontier-level AI capability is no longer a distant academic dream but an imminent market reality, forcing a fundamental re-evaluation of competitive moats and the very structure of the AI industry. The genie isn't just out of the bottle; it's building better bottles for everyone else.

#Weekly recap