AI News - August 2025

An overview of interesting AI News for the Yate and Sodbury U3A's monthly AI News meeting held on August 14th 2025 (meetings are second Thursday of month, 1400-1545, St John's Church Centre, Wickwar Road, Chipping Sodbury, UK - all welcome). Note that this is a summary to act as background as the topics are discussed in detail at the meeting itself. We also demonstrate other AI products and services and much more.

From now on the 'Introduction to AI' course we run in Chipping Sodbury uses these News sessions to replace classes 5 and 6 as the topics in them (humanoid robots, self driving cars, ethics, futures) are now relevant to each month's discussions.

[1.1] AI Video - Google DeepMind's Genie 3 World Model

Real time worlds created from prompts as you explore them, with memory of what you did so that youu can return to a previous point without it having changed.

[1.2] AI Video - Changes to existing video using prompts

Luma Labs allowing videos to be changed with simple prompts

[1.3] AI Video - Midjourney image to video

Midjourney were already leaders in 'text to image' creation. Their new video animations, like the one below, can produce up to 20 second video clips with the ability to give both start and end images. All this at an affordable price.

[1.4] AI Video - Turning old images of real people to live video with Grok 4

In the example below the person posting says that they never knew their mother but that now AI (Grok Imagine) has turned an old photo to video, which makes them happy. Of course, the person in the video may not be behaving as their mother woud have done. There are many issues here


[2] Zuckerberg says their AI is starting to self-improve

He says "Our mission is to deliver personal superintelligence to everyone in the world."


[3.1] OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5

Here the version "GPT-5 Pro" is suggested as having an IQ of 148 though the effectiveness of the test is uncertain. Many early reports from technical users like scientific researchers are also positive.

[3.2] Competition to be seen as the 'best' AI in various fields continues

This concerns the International Math Olympiad (IMO) but the particular result is less important than the continued improvement across many AI models. This was from OpenAI's with ChatGPT.

[3.3] Elon Musk's xAI with Grok 4 was not impressed by ChatGPT-5


[4.1] Humanoids - Jenson Huang of NVidia says the world is short of millions of workers

He believes that humanoids will fill the gap.


[4.2] Humanoids - China announces the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games

China continues to encourage fierce competition between companies in creating humaoids.


[4.3] Humanoids - Tesla's Optimus serves popcorn

[4.4] Humanoids doing stuff - Figure's humanoid folds laundry

[4.5] Humanoids doing stuff - UBTech's Walker swaps its battery before returning to production line

[5.1] The growing dangers of “AI induced psychosis”


[5.2] The dangers of “AI girlfriends” etc

[6.1] Tesla Self Driving - San Francisco to LA (362 miles) without intervention


[6.2] Tesla Self Driving - coming to London

[6.3] Tesla Self Driving - on the Swindon magic roundabout


[7.1] Tesla Robotaxi - expanding area coverage

At the moment there is still a safety operative in the front passenger seat but that may soon change.


[7.2] RoboTaxi in action