The AI race is heating up just in time for winter.

As my colleagues Kylie Robison and Tom Warren reported, OpenAI is eyeing a December debut for its next flagship AI model. Fittingly, Google is also aiming to release its next major Gemini 2.0 model in the same month, sources familiar with the plan tell me. As OpenAI and Google continue their game of trying to one-up each other, xAI, Meta, and Anthropic are all also racing to debut their next frontier models.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doing a phased rollout of the successor to GPT-4, starting first with his business partners, my sources say that Google is planning to widely release the next version of Gemini at the outset. I've heard that the model isn't showing the performance gains the Demis Hassabis-led team had hoped for, though I would still expect some interesting new capabilities. (The chatter I'm hearing in AI circles is that this trend is happening across companies developing leading, large models.)