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OpenAI boasts enterprise win days after internal ‘code red’ on Google threat | TechCrunch

OpenAI boasts enterprise win days after internal ‘code red’ on Google threat | TechCrunch

OpenAI released new data Monday showing enterprise usage of its AI tools has surged dramatically over the past year, with ChatGPT message volume growing 8x since November 2024 and workers reporting they’re saving up to an hour daily. The findings arrive a week after CEO Sam Altman sent an internal “code red” memo about the competitive threat of Google.

The timing underscores OpenAI’s push to reframe its position as the enterprise AI leader, even as it faces mounting pressures. While close to 36% of U.S. businesses are ChatGPT Enterprise customers compared to 14.3% for Anthropic, per Ramp AI Index, the majority of OpenAI’s revenue still comes from consumer subscriptions — a base that’s being threatened by Google’s Gemini. OpenAI also must compete against rival AI firm Anthropic — whose revenue comes mainly from B2B sales – and, increasingly, open-weight model providers for enterprise customers.

The AI giant has committed  $1.4 trillion to infrastructure commitments over the next few years, making enterprise growth essential to its business model. 

“If you think about it from an economic growth perspective, consumers really matter,” Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, said during a briefing. “But when you look at historically transformative technologies like the steam engine, it’s when firms adopt and scale these technologies that you really see the biggest economic benefits.”

OpenAI’s new findings suggest that adoption among larger enterprises is not only growing but becoming more integrated into workflows. Employees aren’t only sending more messages — organizations using OpenAI’s API (its developer interface) are consuming 320 times more “reasoning tokens” than they were a year ago, suggesting companies are using AI for more complex problem-solving. That, or they are experimenting heavily with the new tech and burning through tokens, without necessarily getting long-term value. 

That increase in reasoning tokens, which correlates with increased energy usage, could be expensive for companies and therefore not sustainable in the long term. TechCrunch has asked OpenAI about enterprise budget allocation for AI and the sustainability of this growth rate. 

Image Credits:OpenAI

Beyond raw usage metrics, OpenAI is also seeing changes in how companies deploy its tools. Use of custom GPTs — which companies use to codify institutional knowledge into assistants or automate workflows —  jumped 19x this year, now accounting for 20% of enterprise messages, the report found. OpenAI pointed to digital bank customer BBVA, which it says regularly uses over 4,000 custom GPTs.

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“It shows you how much people are really able to take this powerful technology and start to customize it to the things that are useful to them,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, during the briefing.

These integrations have led to meaningful time savings, according to OpenAI. Participants reported saving 40 to 60 minutes per day with OpenAI’s enterprise products — though that may not include time spent learning the systems, prompting, or correcting AI output. 

The report found that enterprise workers are also increasingly leveraging AI tools to expand their own capabilities. Three quarters of those surveyed say AI enables them to do things, including technical tasks, they couldn’t do before. OpenAI reported a 36% increase in coding-related messages outside of engineering, IT, and research teams. 

While OpenAI drove home the idea that its technology is democratizing access to skills, it’s important to note that more vibe coding could lead to more security vulnerabilities and other flaws. When asked about this, Lightcap pointed to OpenAI’s recent release of its agentic security researcher Aardvark, which is in private beta, as a potential way to detect bugs, vulnerabilities, and exploits. 

The gaps are widest between frontier and median workers for writing, coding, and analysis. Image Credits:OpenAI

OpenAI’s report also found that even the most active ChatGPT Enterprise users aren’t using the most advanced tools available to them, like data analysis, reasoning, or search. During the briefing, Lightcap mused that this was because fully adopting AI systems requires a mindset shift and deeper integration with enterprise data and processes. Adoption of advanced features will take time, he said, as companies retool workflows to better understand what’s possible. 

Lightcap and Chatterji also stressed a report finding that showed a “growing divide in AI adoption,” with some “frontier” workers using more tools more often to save more time than the “laggards.”

“There are firms that still very much see these systems as a piece of software, something I can buy and give to my teams and that’s kind of the end of it,” Lightcap said. “And then there are companies that are really starting to embrace it, almost more like an operating system. It’s basically a re-platforming of a lot of the company’s operations.”

OpenAI’s leadership — which certainly feels the pressure of the firm’s $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments — framed this as an opportunity for laggards to catch up. For workers training AI systems to replicate their work, “catching up” might feel more like a countdown.

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Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Throneshappened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences.

While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season.

Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.

The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.

I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season.

So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.

Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them.

In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more.

It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:

It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions.

While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

#Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media">‘Alice in Borderland: Retry’ Makes Up For the Netflix Series Reheating ‘Squid Game’ Nachos
                Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones… happened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences. While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_44FFKZ1M[/embed] Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.

 The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.

 [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8p6YkEPVco[/embed] I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season.  Alice in Borderland Retry is now available in print and digital!  Read a free preview: https://t.co/OJcjm9wliH pic.twitter.com/8iqGzwjTIV — VIZ Media (@VIZMedia) July 21, 2026  So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.

 Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them. In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq2p_B5MD0c[/embed] It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:

 It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions. While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives.  Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.      #Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media

happened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences.

While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season.

Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.

The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.

I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season.

So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.

Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them.

In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more.

It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:

It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions.

While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

#Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media">‘Alice in Borderland: Retry’ Makes Up For the Netflix Series Reheating ‘Squid Game’ Nachos‘Alice in Borderland: Retry’ Makes Up For the Netflix Series Reheating ‘Squid Game’ Nachos
                Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones… happened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences. While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_44FFKZ1M[/embed] Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.

 The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.

 [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8p6YkEPVco[/embed] I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season.  Alice in Borderland Retry is now available in print and digital!  Read a free preview: https://t.co/OJcjm9wliH pic.twitter.com/8iqGzwjTIV — VIZ Media (@VIZMedia) July 21, 2026  So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.

 Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them. In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq2p_B5MD0c[/embed] It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:

 It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions. While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives.  Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.      #Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media

Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Throneshappened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences.

While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season.

Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.

The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.

I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season.

So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.

Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them.

In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more.

It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:

It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions.

While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

#Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media

The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday.

Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and AI adviser to President Donald Trump, called the performance of Moonshot’s model “concerning.” Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US might impose sanctions on Chinese AI companies.

On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alleged that the Trump administration has “information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” which he said amounted to “stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research” and was “unacceptable.” (Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The new Chinese models have a few things in common: Third-party benchmarks show that they perform nearly as well as the best Western models; they are optimized for agentic coding tasks (the hottest thing in AI this year); and they are or will soon be released with open weights, making them accessible and transparent.

But perhaps the biggest parallel between the current moment and January 2025—when the world was shocked by DeepSeek’s R1 model—is that it reaffirms how American and Chinese AI labs are taking diverging paths when it comes to being open or closed.

When it first burst onto the scene, DeepSeek challenged the premise that only closed-source models built with billions of dollars of investment in compute infrastructure and training could achieve frontier performance. But since then, Western AI labs have continued developing AI the same way, and now American frontier models feel more roped-off than they were a year ago.

Anthropic said for months that its latest Mythos model was so dangerously good at hacking that only approved collaborators could use it. When it was finally released more widely, the White House responded by issuing broad export controls, which forced Anthropic to take Mythos and its less capable sister model, Fable 5, offline temporarily. OpenAI similarly delayed the release of GPT 5.6 after it received a request from the White House.

In China, meanwhile, the situation looks very different. Chinese startups and tech giants have doubled down on open source: Anyone with a good enough computer environment can now download an open-weight model, run it locally, add customizations, and overall enjoy a much greater degree of freedom than OpenAI and Anthropic would ever allow. In many ways, the open versus closed debate is more entangled with the US versus China debate than ever before.

There are a lot of reasons why Chinese labs have chosen a business strategy built atop open-source models. Being the newer, smaller fish in the AI field, making their models free and open can help Chinese firms attract more users, collaborators, and media spotlight. It also puts them in a separate lane of competition from the one that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceX, and other deep-pocketed giants are in.

Earlier this year, rumors spread that Alibaba might be considering joining the closed-source race after it rearranged its corporate AI model development teams. But the tech giant announced on Monday that it would again release the latest version of Qwen—its line of open-source models beloved by the global tech community—with open weights, signaling to customers and the public it is not pivoting away yet.

#Chinas #Open #Models #Challenging #Silicon #Valleys #Playbookchina,open source,alibaba,generative ai,national security,artificial intelligence">China’s Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley’s PlaybookThe AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday.Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and AI adviser to President Donald Trump, called the performance of Moonshot’s model “concerning.” Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US might impose sanctions on Chinese AI companies.On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alleged that the Trump administration has “information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” which he said amounted to “stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research” and was “unacceptable.” (Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)The new Chinese models have a few things in common: Third-party benchmarks show that they perform nearly as well as the best Western models; they are optimized for agentic coding tasks (the hottest thing in AI this year); and they are or will soon be released with open weights, making them accessible and transparent.But perhaps the biggest parallel between the current moment and January 2025—when the world was shocked by DeepSeek’s R1 model—is that it reaffirms how American and Chinese AI labs are taking diverging paths when it comes to being open or closed.When it first burst onto the scene, DeepSeek challenged the premise that only closed-source models built with billions of dollars of investment in compute infrastructure and training could achieve frontier performance. But since then, Western AI labs have continued developing AI the same way, and now American frontier models feel more roped-off than they were a year ago.Anthropic said for months that its latest Mythos model was so dangerously good at hacking that only approved collaborators could use it. When it was finally released more widely, the White House responded by issuing broad export controls, which forced Anthropic to take Mythos and its less capable sister model, Fable 5, offline temporarily. OpenAI similarly delayed the release of GPT 5.6 after it received a request from the White House.In China, meanwhile, the situation looks very different. Chinese startups and tech giants have doubled down on open source: Anyone with a good enough computer environment can now download an open-weight model, run it locally, add customizations, and overall enjoy a much greater degree of freedom than OpenAI and Anthropic would ever allow. In many ways, the open versus closed debate is more entangled with the US versus China debate than ever before.There are a lot of reasons why Chinese labs have chosen a business strategy built atop open-source models. Being the newer, smaller fish in the AI field, making their models free and open can help Chinese firms attract more users, collaborators, and media spotlight. It also puts them in a separate lane of competition from the one that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceX, and other deep-pocketed giants are in.Earlier this year, rumors spread that Alibaba might be considering joining the closed-source race after it rearranged its corporate AI model development teams. But the tech giant announced on Monday that it would again release the latest version of Qwen—its line of open-source models beloved by the global tech community—with open weights, signaling to customers and the public it is not pivoting away yet.#Chinas #Open #Models #Challenging #Silicon #Valleys #Playbookchina,open source,alibaba,generative ai,national security,artificial intelligence

DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday.

Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and AI adviser to President Donald Trump, called the performance of Moonshot’s model “concerning.” Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US might impose sanctions on Chinese AI companies.

On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alleged that the Trump administration has “information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” which he said amounted to “stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research” and was “unacceptable.” (Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The new Chinese models have a few things in common: Third-party benchmarks show that they perform nearly as well as the best Western models; they are optimized for agentic coding tasks (the hottest thing in AI this year); and they are or will soon be released with open weights, making them accessible and transparent.

But perhaps the biggest parallel between the current moment and January 2025—when the world was shocked by DeepSeek’s R1 model—is that it reaffirms how American and Chinese AI labs are taking diverging paths when it comes to being open or closed.

When it first burst onto the scene, DeepSeek challenged the premise that only closed-source models built with billions of dollars of investment in compute infrastructure and training could achieve frontier performance. But since then, Western AI labs have continued developing AI the same way, and now American frontier models feel more roped-off than they were a year ago.

Anthropic said for months that its latest Mythos model was so dangerously good at hacking that only approved collaborators could use it. When it was finally released more widely, the White House responded by issuing broad export controls, which forced Anthropic to take Mythos and its less capable sister model, Fable 5, offline temporarily. OpenAI similarly delayed the release of GPT 5.6 after it received a request from the White House.

In China, meanwhile, the situation looks very different. Chinese startups and tech giants have doubled down on open source: Anyone with a good enough computer environment can now download an open-weight model, run it locally, add customizations, and overall enjoy a much greater degree of freedom than OpenAI and Anthropic would ever allow. In many ways, the open versus closed debate is more entangled with the US versus China debate than ever before.

There are a lot of reasons why Chinese labs have chosen a business strategy built atop open-source models. Being the newer, smaller fish in the AI field, making their models free and open can help Chinese firms attract more users, collaborators, and media spotlight. It also puts them in a separate lane of competition from the one that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceX, and other deep-pocketed giants are in.

Earlier this year, rumors spread that Alibaba might be considering joining the closed-source race after it rearranged its corporate AI model development teams. But the tech giant announced on Monday that it would again release the latest version of Qwen—its line of open-source models beloved by the global tech community—with open weights, signaling to customers and the public it is not pivoting away yet.

#Chinas #Open #Models #Challenging #Silicon #Valleys #Playbookchina,open source,alibaba,generative ai,national security,artificial intelligence">China’s Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley’s Playbook

The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday.

Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and AI adviser to President Donald Trump, called the performance of Moonshot’s model “concerning.” Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US might impose sanctions on Chinese AI companies.

On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alleged that the Trump administration has “information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” which he said amounted to “stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research” and was “unacceptable.” (Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The new Chinese models have a few things in common: Third-party benchmarks show that they perform nearly as well as the best Western models; they are optimized for agentic coding tasks (the hottest thing in AI this year); and they are or will soon be released with open weights, making them accessible and transparent.

But perhaps the biggest parallel between the current moment and January 2025—when the world was shocked by DeepSeek’s R1 model—is that it reaffirms how American and Chinese AI labs are taking diverging paths when it comes to being open or closed.

When it first burst onto the scene, DeepSeek challenged the premise that only closed-source models built with billions of dollars of investment in compute infrastructure and training could achieve frontier performance. But since then, Western AI labs have continued developing AI the same way, and now American frontier models feel more roped-off than they were a year ago.

Anthropic said for months that its latest Mythos model was so dangerously good at hacking that only approved collaborators could use it. When it was finally released more widely, the White House responded by issuing broad export controls, which forced Anthropic to take Mythos and its less capable sister model, Fable 5, offline temporarily. OpenAI similarly delayed the release of GPT 5.6 after it received a request from the White House.

In China, meanwhile, the situation looks very different. Chinese startups and tech giants have doubled down on open source: Anyone with a good enough computer environment can now download an open-weight model, run it locally, add customizations, and overall enjoy a much greater degree of freedom than OpenAI and Anthropic would ever allow. In many ways, the open versus closed debate is more entangled with the US versus China debate than ever before.

There are a lot of reasons why Chinese labs have chosen a business strategy built atop open-source models. Being the newer, smaller fish in the AI field, making their models free and open can help Chinese firms attract more users, collaborators, and media spotlight. It also puts them in a separate lane of competition from the one that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceX, and other deep-pocketed giants are in.

Earlier this year, rumors spread that Alibaba might be considering joining the closed-source race after it rearranged its corporate AI model development teams. But the tech giant announced on Monday that it would again release the latest version of Qwen—its line of open-source models beloved by the global tech community—with open weights, signaling to customers and the public it is not pivoting away yet.

#Chinas #Open #Models #Challenging #Silicon #Valleys #Playbookchina,open source,alibaba,generative ai,national security,artificial intelligence

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