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World models go mainstream

PLUS: Patients control AI and robotics with thought

Zach Mink

November 13, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. We've heard plenty of commentary about world models being the future, but the public has had few ways to meaningfully access them.

AI 'godmother' Fei-Fei Li just changed that with World Labs’ Marble, an editable 3D environment generator that could finally carry ‘spatial intelligence’ from research hype into real creative workflows.

In today’s AI rundown:

Fei-Fei Li's World Labs launches Marble
OpenAI’s GPT 5.1 with new personality presets
Use ChatGPT Projects to onboard new hires
OpenAI battles court order on ChatGPT logs
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WORLD LABS

🌎 Fei-Fei Li's World Labs launches Marble

Image source: World Labs

The Rundown: AI ‘Godmother’ Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs just released Marble, its first commercial world model that generates persistent 3D environments from text, images, videos, or 3D layouts, positioning it ahead of rivals like Google's Genie and Decart.

The details:

Users can both create new worlds via text, image, and video prompts or edit, combine, and expand on existing ones to make granular changes.
The platform lets creators export worlds as Gaussian splats, meshes, or videos, allowing for use and import into gaming, VFX, and VR workflows.
The model is now generally available after its initial September release in preview, offering both freemium and paid tiers starting at $20/mo.
Marble coincides with Li’s essay on spatial intelligence, saying world models are a crucial step forward from LLMs without grounding in physical space.

Why it matters: While areas like gaming and VR might be the first use cases to come to mind, the list of applications is limitless — from simulated environments for robotics, architecture design to cinematic world building. Like image and video models, world models feel like a tool that is going to be in many workflows across domains very soon.

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OPENAI

👋 OpenAI’s GPT 5.1 with new personality presets

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just rolled out GPT-5.1, an upgraded version of its flagship model that emphasizes a more conversational tone and new user customizations — introducing eight personality presets alongside improvements to reasoning speed.

The details:

The release includes 5.1 Instant, which OAI describes as warmer and more instruction-focused, and Thinking, which upgrades efficiency and clarity.
Users can now select from eight tone presets (Default, Professional, Friendly, Candid, Quirky, Efficient, Nerdy, and Cynical) to steer and customize the model.
The company also introduced experimental characteristic tunings like emoji use, warmness, and response scalability, available via ‘Personalization Settings’.
OAI did not provide benchmarks for the 5.1 rollout, only showing a chart comparing the model’s time spent on easy vs. hard tasks compared to GPT-5.

Why it matters: The GPT-5.1 rollout is an odd one for OAI, feeling rushed with less hype, benchmarking, and fanfare than a typical release. This may signal a push to get ahead of a rival release (any day now, Gemini 3), or it might just be a shift towards a smaller, more incremental update cadence between full reveals like Google and others.

AI TRAINING

🤝 Use ChatGPT Projects to onboard new hires

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use ChatGPT Projects to build a private, shareable workspace with uploaded SOPs, custom instructions, and project-specific memory for onboarding new hires smoothly.

Step-by-step:

Open ChatGPT, enable the sidebar, select "Projects," then "New project," and name it (e.g., "Onboarding")
Upload your SOP files to the Project, balancing context carefully to avoid overloading the AI's memory
Share the Project by adding your new hire's email; they'll access the workspace with all files, chats, and memory intact
New hires start with a kickoff prompt using Dictation mode: "I'm a new hire. Role: [title]. Goal: [objective]. Do not start yet. First, ask clarifying questions about my role before onboarding"
Continue chatting for targeted answers from uploaded SOPs, then share specific chat threads by copying the chat link

Pro Tip: Use dictation mode to work faster, limit the memories to that Project only, and provide just enough context without overloading the context window.

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OPENAI & THE NEW YORK TIMES

🏛️ OpenAI battles court order on ChatGPT logs

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI is pushing to appeal a ruling that requires the AI leader to hand over 20M anonymized ChatGPT conversations to the New York Times as part of an ongoing copyright lawsuit, calling the request an “invasion of user privacy.”

The details:

A judge ruled that the requested chat logs were appropriate discovery material, saying OAI’s de-identification process already protects users’ privacy.
The NYT originally requested 1.4B chats, before narrowing to a random sample of 20M from Dec. 2022 to Nov. 2024 to look for potential copyright violations.
OpenAI aims to remove the order in a letter to the court, also publishing a blog publicly detailing its stance on user privacy and the “baseless lawsuit.”
OpenAI argued that "99.99%" of the transcripts have no connection to the copyright claims, calling the request a "speculative fishing expedition.”

Why it matters: OAI continues to fight, but it sounds like the court has made up its mind — though positioning the issue as a violation of user privacy is a good way to swing consumers on your side. While these anonymized chats will likely be in the hands of the NYT eventually, ‘AI confidentiality’ feels ready to become a bigger discussion.

QUICK HITS

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🤖 Tiger Data - AI-Native Agentic Postgres for iterative Agents — smart MCPs, Vector search & Forkable infra. Try the CLI free*
🌎 Marble - Create persistent 3D worlds from images, videos, and text prompts
🤖 GPT-5.1 - OpenAI’s upgraded model with personality customization
⭐️ Iconic Marketplace - ElevenLabs licensing platform for celebrity voices

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📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic announced a massive $50B investment in U.S. AI infrastructure, building out the company’s first custom data centers in Texas and New York starting in 2026.

Baidu released ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking (and they say OAI needs work on naming!), a multimodal reasoner that claims to beat GPT-5 high and Gemini 2.5 Pro on visual benchmarks.

ByteDance’s Volcano Engine launched Doubao-Seed-Code, an AI coding assistant that matches Claude Sonnet on benchmarks while undercutting rivals by 60% in price.

Even Realities unveiled G2, a line of smart glasses with a ‘spatial display’ that projects info at different visual depths and an R1 control ring for gesture-based interactions.

Weibo AI open-sourced VibeThinker-1.5B, a model reportedly trained for just $7,800 that shows strong performance on math, coding, and reasoning at a tiny size.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Atanas N. in London, U.K.:

"As a Data Manager, I noticed a recurring issue: marketing often needs facts from our research reports for content or PR, and they will ask the research team, which is busy with other priorities. I built a solution using Zapier agents. Each agent is trained on the latest version of a report. I also created a classifier agent that routes questions to the right report agent.

I published everything in Microsoft Teams and set up a shared chat. Now marketing can ask any question and get an instant answer with a citation to the exact page and chapter. Even the CEO uses it to quickly check facts.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.