ChatGPT Codex, Lawsuit Drama and A 52 Dollar Festival

OpenAI expands tools, lawsuits heat up and a small town in Brazil wins the internet with a $52 Veo promo video.

Fellow Data Tinkerers!

It’s time for another weekly round-up on all things Data and AI. But before that, I wanted to mention If keeping up with the latest news is not your jam, you can click on settings and turn it off (Data Bytes) and keep receiving emails for the other topics you are interested 👇

I’d rather you receive fewer emails that you are interested in than getting stuff you are not crazy about :)

Now, with that out of the way, let’s get to this week’s round-up!

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The Buzz 🐝

• OpenAI’s Codex is now available to ChatGPT Plus users. it can write, debug and run code in a sandboxed dev environment and access internet if allowed. Plus, ChatGPT has updated its ‘connectors’ and it can now dig into Gmail, Drive, GitHub and more to pull what you need, cite the source and skip the manual uploads.

  

  (Source: OpenAI)

• On the legal/copyright front, it has been an interesting week. A court order now is forcing OpenAI to keep all ChatGPT chats indefinitely, deleted or not, as part of the New York Times copyright lawsuit and privacy folks aren’t thrilled. Reddit’s coming for Anthropic over scraping, claiming Claude trained on 100k+ Reddit posts without permission. And DeepSeek R1’s getting heat for possibly training on Gemini outputs even as it closes the gap on top-tier models. I mean how could the DeepSeek folks do something morally so dubious? Big tech companies would never do anything like that …

  

  (Source: The Atlantic)

• And Google Veo 3 headline making videos continue as Ulianópolis, a small city in Brazil, made waves by producing a promotional video for its cultural festival using Google's Veo 3 AI, spending just about $52 USD. (Btw, for any Portuguese speakers, how is the language and pronunciation?)

Meanwhile, AMC is partnering with Runway to inject generative AI into TV development and marketing. As I raised the question last week, how long before we start seeing realistic movie length videos? I bet a lot of the creative ad agencies look like this now …

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Data Science & AI

• My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
  This is an interesting take on using AI in your workflow. The author is contending that if you’re still anti-AI in dev workflows, you’re the one holding things back.

• The Illusion of Thinking
  An interesting piece of research by Apple making the rounds. it reveals that current AI models, including leading large reasoning models, falter when faced with complex problems, often mistaking pattern recognition for genuine reasoning.

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Data Engineering

• Snowflake Summit 2025 Highlights
  Probably like me, your LinkedIn was full of all the Snowflake announcement. This link gives you the highlight of the summit (Note: Expect a lot AI this and Agent that)

• Kafka: The End of the Beginning
  Interesting take by

  Chris
  about streaming’s future, arguing Kafka and Flink might be holding things back and it might be time for Streaming’s Lakehouse moment

• Building a Distributed Cache for S3
  ClickHouse just rolled out a distributed cache for object storage that keeps hot data instantly accessible across all compute nodes, no more cold starts or re-fetching from S3.

  

  (Source: Clickhouse)

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Data Analysis and Visualisation

• Plotly Studio
  Plotly launched Plotly Studio for early access. It’s an AI-native desktop app that builds full-featured, Python-backed data apps in minutes using just your dataset.

  

• Freelancing in 2025 as a Data Analyst
  Ever wondered if freelancing in data is actually worth it or just LinkedIn hype. This post is a refreshingly honest look at life as a freelance data analyst, minus the sugar-coating.

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Sam Altman might qualify!

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