- AI with Kyle
- Posts
- AI with Kyle Daily Update 113
AI with Kyle Daily Update 113
Today in AI: Google make intelligence free + ChatGPT app store launches
Kyle Balmer
December 19, 2025
The skinny on what's happening in AI - straight from the previous live session:
Highlights
⚡ Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier Intelligence at 1/4 the Price
Google just democratised building with AI. Near-GPT 5.2 performance for 50 cents per million tokens. Cheap, fast and good.
Kyle's take: The day I take off sick is when everything drops! Gemini 3 Flash is the stripped-down, fast version of Gemini 3 - and it's brilliant. It’s out performing other models whilst being a fraction of the price.
This pricing isn’t for those who use the app. That’s something else. This is instead for when you build using their API - basically when you want to hook your software, app or website to AI and pay per use.
It costs 50 cents per million input tokens and $3 per million output, making it 4 times cheaper than Gemini 3 Pro.: it scores 33.7% on Humanity’s Last Exam versus Pro's 37.5% - nearly as good for a quarter of the price.
Compare that to GPT 5.2 at $1.75 input and $14 output - this is frontier-level intelligence becoming too cheap to measure. That’s the goal here and we are moving towards it extremely rapidly. This is what we need - not just the billionaires having access to the best models, but everyone being able to build with genuinely powerful AI.
Source: Google announcement, Jeff Dean's analysis
📱 ChatGPT Finally Launches App Store - 900M User Distribution
ChatGPT app store seems to be rolling out. It’s a little hidden for some users (press + then More then Explore Apps) but it’s here!
Kyle's take: OpenAI finally released their app store after months of SDK development. It's weirdly hidden - you have to go to Plus, then More, then Explore Apps at the bottom (though they updated and added to my sidebar during my livesteam so maybe it’s temporarily hidden).
Lots of cool apps there already Canva, Adobe Express, Spotify, Airtable, Lovable, Replit, even Google Drive integration! These aren't custom GPTs - they're proper apps living inside ChatGPT.
This works on mobile too which is fascinating. Apple normally never allows app stores inside apps - remember the Epic Games Fortnite lawsuit? But OpenAI got permission.
If you're a developer, this is huge - submit your app and get potential access to 900 million weekly active users. That's distribution you can't buy anywhere else and right now it’s pretty open.
They're not charging yet but monetization will probably open up. It was discussed when they launched their Apps SDK. Don't wait - first movers will win big here.
🔬 $25K to Translate 20 Years of Chinese Research - Funded in Minutes
Entire Chinese scientific archive being translated by AI. Decades of research suddenly accessible to Western scientists.
Kyle's take: This is one of those "holy shit, AI is amazing" moments. Someone's translating the entire Chinese preprint server - years of scientific research that's been basically inaccessible to Western researchers.
The fundraiser asked for $25,000 and was funded in minutes.
Very cool. But I think the big news here is the fact that AI could do the job for only $25,000. That's less than half of one translator's salary (less actually because a technical translator would be needed), and it'll unlock an entire body of scientific knowledge.
Think about it - China's been publishing cutting-edge research for decades (especially fusion) but language barriers meant Western scientists couldn't access it. Now we're just running it all through AI for basically pennies.
This is the kind of thing that makes you realise how transformative this technology is. Not replacing humans with chatbots, but breaking down barriers that have existed forever. In a few months, Western researchers will have access to two decades of Chinese scientific thinking they've never seen before.
What other barriers can we just eradicated like this?
Source: ChinaRxiv archive, Translation fundraiser
🛑 Bernie Sanders Wants to Stop AI Data Centers - Even Critics Say It Won't Work
Calling for moratorium on AI infrastructure. Problem: China won't stop. Even AI doomers disagree with Bernie.
Kyle's take: Bernie Sanders is pushing for a moratorium on data centers powering AI development, saying democracy needs to catch up and benefits should work for all, not just the 1%. I'm progressive and agree with Bernie on a lot, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening.
Even Eliezer Yudkowsky - who wrote "If Anyone Builds It We All Die" and is the most staunch AI critic - says Bernie's wrong. That speaks volumes!
If we shut down all US data centers, China continues and wins the race. This is global, not regional. Stopping in America doesn't pause AI, it just hands victory to China.
Nick Dobos nailed it: "Are you trying to NIMBY data centers? Constrain AI compute and free tiers vanish - only the rich have the best AI." We're already seeing this divide with Claude Pro at $200/month. If you can afford it, you're 10-20x more productive. If not, you're cut out. We need what Google just did with Flash - making AI cheaper and more available, not restricting it to the rich.
Source: Bernie Sanders statement
⚖️ "AI Will Kill All The Lawyers" - Senior Barrister's Drunken Warning
Complex appeal that took 1.5 days was done better by AI in 30 seconds. "How can any of us compete?"
It’s over
Kyle's take: This is anecdotal but revealing - a journalist got a senior English barrister drunk and got him talking about AI. Well worth the read: original piece.
They did an experiment with a complex civil court appeal he'd written that took him a day and a half. Fed it to Grok (weird choice but ok) and it produced something "spectacular, actually staggering" in 30 seconds that was "much better than mine - and remember, I am very good at this."
His quote: "It was the best possible legal document, done in seconds for pennies. How can any of us compete?" He says it'll work up the hierarchy - first grunt work, then drafting, citations, argumentation. The pyramid collapses from the bottom as juniors can't learn through discovery work that AI now does. Meanwhile AI gets better, moving up the stack. Partners near retirement will bring in AI to boost margins by removing expensive labor, not caring about the industry's future.
His advice to his niece who wants to be a lawyer? "Please do not destroy your life. Do not get into lifetime debt for a job that won't exist in 10 years."
Source: Spectator article
Member Questions:
Kyle's response: Nope, not at all unfortunately. China's in the best position, then America though their relationship with AI is fraught. We have DeepMind here but Google bought them in 2014 for $400 million - now looks like one of the best acquisitions in history!
Watch "The Thinking Game" documentary on YouTube about DeepMind and AlphaFold - it's free and shows what they did with Google's resources. Spoiler: a lot!
Demis Hassabis doesn't seem driven by money, he wanted resources to do science, solve complex problems and leave a mark. He won a Nobel Prize so he’s doing alright so far!
Kyle's response: You can access it! VPN to America, go to sora.chat.com (not through the app), use the browser version. You still need a code - best place is the OpenAI Discord in the "sora-2-code" channel. Warning: lots of people spamming fake codes for no reason, wasting everyone's time. But spend half an hour there and you'll find a legitimate one.
Kyle's Community Launch: The 5 Day AI Readiness Challenge is now open. Come to https://community.aiwithkyle.com/c/challenge/ to start.
Want the full unfiltered discussion? Join me tomorrow for the daily AI news live stream where we dig into the stories and you can ask questions directly.