AI News
First, some notes on Gemini as I posted them to my Slack group:
Last week Google released Gemini 2.5. Free on their AI studio website if you don’t mind them training on your chats. In the API, Gemini has a context window of 2,000,000 tokens, about 1,500,000 words. Compare this to Sonnet, at 200,000 tokens which is higher than most OpenAI models. But, in previous Google models using anywhere near that number of tokens decreased performance.
ChatGPT put their 4o image creator out which is the best I’ve seen bar none. It can also make iterative improvements on images without completely losing context. It does text well too.
Here are three images I asked 4o to make, each building on each other (Top Guns is the name of my peer group)
This kind of continuity between images was previously unheard of. Expect to see it in their video gen soon
I don’t remember if I linked to LMArena before, the de facto leaderboard for AI. Gemini 2.5 has a substantial lead there.
https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard
Current Leaderboard (2025-04-01)
If look closely, you’ll see that ChatGPT is second place with an update to an existing model that they didn’t make a big deal of.
DeepSeek takes both 5 and 7.
But, Google also released Gemma3, open source models based on their Gemini work. In limited testing, Gemma3 performs strong on my Mac at 27b parameters. Compare, R1 has 671b.
I don’t see Gemma3 on LMArena at all yet.
Second, reporting from The Information on OpenAI financials:
ChatGPT has hit 20 million paid subscribers, according to a spokesperson…
The strong growth rate suggests ChatGPT is currently generating at least $415 million in revenue per month (a pace of $5 billion a year), up 30% from at least $333 million per month ($4 billion annually) at the end of last year.
The actual figure could be somewhat higher, given that corporate ChatGPT plans are more expensive and the company has had early success selling $200-a-month Pro plans, which are 10 times more expensive than basic ChatGPT Plus plans…
ChatGPT revenue is separate from [API sales]…
If OpenAI keeps up this growth rate or anything like it, its overall revenue projection of $12.7 billion in 2025, up from about $4 billion in 2024, seems well within reach.
Third (update),
I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 Pro thought Cline for a couple of hours today. I don’t know that I’d call it significantly better than Sonnet 3.7, or Claude Code. Despite the huge context window
Google Removes DEI Language
The Information reports that Google is removing language from studies, even old ones, or telling researchers to restrict access to such documents.
This is a clear example of government pressure leading to self-censorship like we are used to seeing China.
Two imporant points of context.
- Google has often been willing to self-censor to keep business
- It’s clear that the Biden admin pressured big tech as well
OpenAI Adopts MCP
My notes to my peer group on the adoption of MCP by OpenAI:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1904957755829481737.html?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
MCP 🤝 OpenAI Agents SDK
You can now connect your Model Context Protocol servers to Agents:
We’re also working on MCP support for the OpenAI API and ChatGPT desktop app—we’ll share some more news in the coming months.
This is a big deal. It means that MCP just became the de facto protocol for connecting LLMs to outside systems.
I also suspect it will increase the speed at which MCP gets past a couple of roadblocks, the biggest being its single-user paradigm which makes it hard to roll out on a hosted platform. (Stateful API calls thru stdio for the programmers here).
Today, MCP “servers” are more like plugins for Claude desktop than actual servers. You run them locally.
Soon, ChatGPT desktop users will be able to use them too.
In turn, it means at some point you’ll have users downloading and installing them on their own. That day is a little ways off: the SDKs are only for Python and Node (JavaScript) which both run great on macOS and Linux but are a royal PITA to get going on Windows. Whenever a .Net or Java SDK is released though I’d expect to see a significant uptick in user-level usage.
Cytracom’s ControlOne Downtime Problems
A couple of years ago JM Addington Technology Solutions and CyberSecureRIA changed SASE providers to Cytracom’s ControlOne after our previous vendor had serious reliability issues. Now, we are looking at moving back.
Over the last 12 months (March 2024 – March 2025) ControlOne has had over 36 hours of downtime or partial downtime, excluding maintenance windows, you can see the list below.
Cytracom’s ControlOne TTM Downtimes
Incident | Region | Severity | Start Time | End Time | Duration |
Bridge: Partial Service Degradation US-MidWest (ORD) Region | US-MidWest (ORD) | Major | Mar 22, 2025 – 20:26 CDT | Mar 23, 2025 – 05:24 CDT | 8h 58m |
Partial Service Degradation for Agents in the US-Midwest (ORD) Region (Ongoing) | US-Midwest (ORD) | Major | Mar 21, 2025 15:27 CDT | Mar 22, 2025 – 07:36 CDT | 16h 9m |
Partial Service Degradation for Agents in the US-Midwest (ORD) Region | US-Midwest (ORD) | Major | Mar 20, 2025 16:34 CDT | Mar 20, 2025 18:15 CDT | 1h 41m |
Partial Service Degradation US-SouthEast (ATL) Region | US-SouthEast (ATL) | Minor | Mar 07, 2025 09:38 CST | Mar 07, 2025 11:01 CST | 1h 23m |
Bridge: Partial Service Degradation US-SouthEast (ATL) Region | US-SouthEast (ATL) | Major | Mar 06, 2025 09:15 CST | Mar 06, 2025 13:21 CST | 4h 6m |
Connectivity disruption in the ControlOne US-MidWest (ORD) region | US-Midwest (ORD) | Major | Feb 28, 2025 09:15 CST | Feb 28, 2025 10:17 CST | 1h 2m |
ControlOne IPSec connectivity degradation | Multiple Regions | Minor | Feb 07, 2025 13:17 CST | Feb 07, 2025 16:23 CST | 3h 6m |
Partial Service Degradation in the US-NorthEast (EWR) Region | US-NorthEast (EWR) | Major | Jan 31, 2025 09:43 CST | Jan 31, 2025 12:52 CST | 3h 9m |
Bridge: Partial Service Degradation in US-SouthEast (ATL) Region | US-SouthEast (ATL) | Major | Jan 30, 2025 07:47 CST | Jan 30, 2025 09:10 CST | 1h 23m |
ControlOne Service Outage US-Southcentral (DFW) | US-Southcentral (DFW) | Critical | Jan 29, 2025 18:13 CST | Jan 29, 2025 19:59 CST | 1h 46m |
ControlOne Service Outage US-Northwest (SEA) and US-Southwest (LAX) | US-Northwest (SEA) & US-Southwest (LAX) | Critical | Jan 29, 2025 15:13 CST | Jan 29, 2025 15:57 CST | 0h 44m |
ControlOne US-Southcentral Increased Latency and Impaired Routing | US-Southcentral (DFW) | Major | Jan 25, 2025 12:37 CST | Jan 25, 2025 13:49 CST | 1h 12m |
Service Outage: US-Northeast (EWR) | US-NorthEast (EWR) | Major | Jan 22, 2025 04:10 CST | Jan 22, 2025 06:05 CST | 1h 55m |
Partial service degradation in US-SouthEast (ATL) Region | US-SouthEast (ATL) | Major | Oct 16, 2024 08:22 CDT | Oct 16, 2024 08:41 CDT | 0h 19m |
ControlOne – Partial service degradation in US-NorthEast (EWR) | US-NorthEast (EWR) | Major | Aug 17, 2024 06:44 CDT | Aug 17, 2024 08:48 CDT | 2h 4m |
ControlOne – Partial service degradation in US-NorthEast (EWR) | US-NorthEast (EWR) | Major | Aug 10, 2024 16:24 CDT | Aug 10, 2024 18:49 CDT | 2h 25m |
ControlOne – Partial connectivity degradation in US-NorthEast (EWR) | US-NorthEast (EWR) | Minor | Jun 20, 2024 14:55 CDT | Jun 20, 2024 16:31 CDT | 1h 36m |
ControlOne – Partial degradation in agent connectivity in US-SouthCentral (DFW) | US-Southcentral (DFW) | Minor | Jun 13, 2024 13:44 CDT | Jun 13, 2024 14:17 CDT | 0h 33m |
Degraded Performance in US-SouthCentral (DFW) | US-Southcentral (DFW) | Minor | May 22, 2024 15:26 CDT | May 22, 2024 17:43 CDT | 2h 17m |
ControlOne US-SouthCentral (DFW) Production Routing Outage | US-Southcentral (DFW) | Major | May 08, 2024 18:28 CDT | May 08, 2024 22:53 CDT | 4h 25m |