AI's Gold Medals, Layoffs, & More

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week, we have OpenAI/GDM’s historic IMO gold medal that has more than meets the eye, yet another SOTA model coming from China, and Decart’s unique proposal for real-time video editing.

We also discuss Meta’s AI-optimized concrete and CNBC’s report on the effect of AI in layoffs.

Finally, we take a look at an AI-powered OCR tool, Perplexity Comet’s impressive agentic capabilities, and how video generation models are transforming the ad market.

Enjoy!

VIDEO GENERATION

Decart’s New LSD Model is Incredible

Several months ago, I discussed a company that was attempting to create playable video games by utilizing next-frame prediction.

Similar to how Google’s Genie model worked, it would take a concatenation of past frames and a user’s action (what to do next) and generate the following frames in consonance to past frames and desired action (i.e., if the user wanted to turn right, the model would create frames depicting the world after moving to the right).

That same company has now announced a Live-Stream Diffusion (LSD) model that takes in a video stream and edits it to your liking, as shown in the above GIF.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

With the expected progression of these models, anyone with access to the Internet will soon be capable of creating amazing edits of their family and friends’ videos, marketing campaigns, and more.

But as I was saying earlier, Decart’s efforts go beyond video editing to actual video creation.

Last week, we discussed how Grok 4 has become proficient in creating video games, making the case for the video industry to be one of the most significantly impacted by AI developments.

However, one thing is for models like Grok 4 to create code that brings games alive. Another is for models like Decart’s, which take an image and create entire, playable worlds around it in real-time.

That is, while Grok 4 might write the code just like humans would, Decart’s real-time video generation models create the game frame by frame, without code, and in real-time (sub-40ms latency). Feels almost like magic, and it’s getting better.

FRONTIER MODELS

OpenAI and Google DeepMind Take Gold in IMO

Models developed by OpenAI and GDM achieved a landmark result in the 2025 International Maths Olympiad, both earning gold (although only GDM’s result was verified by the organization).

The interesting aspect here was the approach used, as both were generalist models, meaning they were not exclusively trained for this competition.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

This indicates that AIs are improving at solving complex problems they have not encountered before, but this claim is slightly nuanced. While there’s a lot to celebrate here, let’s not forget that:

Humans still got better results

We can’t guarantee whether this proves AIs are actually really intelligent or just very sophisticated pattern matchers.

Regarding the second point, it’s noteworthy to clarify what I mean. With Large Language Models (LLMs), it’s always a question of whether they have recalled the solution or actually created it from scratch.

In fact, Google acknowledged the heavy use…

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