🎨 Alibaba's Photoshop Killer

Hey folks,

A quick reminder this will be the last newsletter for 2025, I’ll see you back in the 1st week of 2026. Enjoy the holiday break!

OpenAI just gave you a dial to turn down ChatGPT's enthusiasm. New characteristics controls rolling out to subscribers let you adjust warmth, enthusiasm, emoji usage, and how often responses include headers and bullet lists. Access the under your Personalization tab in ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, Google dropped a recap of their 60 biggest AI announcements from 2025. It’s been shippit mode for Google with over 1 AI launch per week this year!

Let's dive in..

🎨 Alibaba Just Open-Sourced a Photoshop Killer

🐝 The Buzz: What if you could turn any flat image into a layered, editable file, automatically, for free? Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Image-Layered, a 20-billion parameter model that decomposes images into multiple RGBA layers with transparent backgrounds. It's image editing infrastructure, the kind of capability that previously required hours of manual masking in Photoshop.

What it actually does:

• Automatically separates any image into 3-8+ independent layers

• Each layer can be scaled, repositioned, recolored, or deleted without affecting others

• Supports splitting a layer into sub-layers for granular control

• Native ComfyUI integration for existing AI workflows

The technical innovation is an RGBA-VAE that treats transparency as a first-class concept. Traditional image models work with RGB (three color channels). This model understands alpha channels natively, which is why it outputs clean masked layers instead of the messy cutouts you get from background removal tools.

What makes this interesting: it's Apache 2.0 licensed. Commercial use, no restrictions. The weights are on HuggingFace, the code is on GitHub, and the research paper dropped on arXiv. Alibaba is betting that giving this away builds ecosystem advantage over keeping it proprietary.

💡 Takeaway: If your team does any image editing for marketing assets, product photos, design iteration, this is worth testing. The barrier to professional-grade layer editing just dropped to zero.

Together with Superhuman AI

Go from AI overwhelmed to AI savvy professional

AI keeps coming up at work, but you still don't get it?

That's exactly why 1M+ professionals working at Google, Meta, and OpenAI read Superhuman AI daily.

Here's what you get:

• Daily AI news that matters for your career - Filtered from 1000s of sources so you know what affects your industry.

• Step-by-step tutorials you can use immediately - Real prompts and workflows that solve actual business problems.

• New AI tools tested and reviewed - We try everything to deliver tools that drive real results.

• All in just 3 minutes a day

Join 1M+ pros

🎁 ChatGPT Now Has Its Own Spotify Wrapped

🐝 The Buzz: OpenAI launched Your Year with ChatGPT a personalized recap showing how you've used the chatbot throughout the year.

The experience includes custom awards based on your usage patterns (like "Creative Debugger" for problem-solving), an AI-generated poem reflecting your topics of interest, and a custom image summarizing your year. It's rolling out to free, Plus, and Pro users in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

What you need to access it:

• "Reference saved memories" enabled in settings

• "Reference chat history" enabled

• A minimum conversation threshold (OpenAI hasn't specified the exact number)

You can find it on the ChatGPT home screen or just ask for "Your Year with ChatGPT" directly.

The real story here isn't the feature, it's the data. OpenAI now has enough conversation history across enough users to generate meaningful year-in-review insights. That's a dataset no other AI company can match. Spotify Wrapped works because Spotify has years of listening data. OpenAI is signalling they've hit a similar milestone with conversational AI.

💡 Takeaway: Whether you find it interesting or slightly unsettling depends on how you feel about an AI reflecting your year back to you. Either way, it's a reminder of how much these systems now know about how we work, think, and communicate.

📰 Like newsletters? Here are more our readers enjoy.

💻️ How to Resize Any Photo with Gemini

Need to resize an image? Nano Banana Pro’s got you. Just upload your image and tell it the aspect ratio you want.

• Go to Gemini

• Select Create Image mode

• Upload your image and prompt one of the following

Change the aspect ratio to 1:1
Change the aspect ratio to 16:9
Change the aspect ratio to 4:3
Change the aspect ratio to 2:1
Change the aspect ratio to 9:16

🐝 AI buzz bits

🌐 AI browser traffic surged 6,900% since July as Perplexity Comet and OpenAI Atlas gain adoption. These agentic browsers shop, research, and complete multi-step tasks autonomously, and security researchers are scrambling to distinguish them from human traffic.

🚗 Waymo suspended San Francisco service after a PG&E substation fire knocked out power to 120,000 customers, robotaxis stalled at intersections with dead traffic lights, and while Waymo says most trips completed successfully, the incident exposed edge cases in autonomous systems now doing 450,000 rides weekly.

 🖥️ Microsoft Copilot Vision now edits text in real-time during screen-sharing sessions, speak naturally ("make this more formal," "simplify this paragraph") and Copilot suggests edits directly in your document without switching apps, rolling out to Windows Insiders now.

🔥 AI productivity tools

For a full list of 1000+ AI tools, visit our Supertool Directory

🤘 Midweek Madness