What's trending in AI right now, from the app charts to the community feeds. Real links, our take.
ChatGPT is closing in on a billion weekly users
As of this week, ChatGPT is approaching 1 billion weekly active users, per a report from The Information. The app crossed 1 billion monthly users back in May, but the weekly figure is a harder benchmark because it means people are coming back every few days rather than just logging in once or twice a month. For comparison, TikTok and Instagram each took five to eight years to reach a billion monthly users. ChatGPT got there in under three years.
OpenAI is giving 100,000 researchers free access to its best models
OpenAI announced a new program this week to give 100,000 academic researchers free access to GPT-5.6 and Codex. It starts with 10,000 scientists this summer and expands through 2027. Participants get ChatGPT Work, larger context windows, and a deep research feature that can pull from hundreds of sources at once. OpenAI is backing the initiative with more than $250 million. If you are affiliated with a research-active university, the program page on OpenAI's site has eligibility details. If you are not, expect more AI-assisted research papers coming out of universities over the next couple of years.
DeepSeek V4 Flash went into public beta today
Searches for "deepseek v4 flash" spiked on Google today, and there is a specific reason: DeepSeek pushed V4 Flash into public API beta on July 31. The model has been available in preview since April, but this release brings a retrained build with improved performance on agent and coding tasks. DeepSeek says it now scores higher than the larger V4 Pro model on several benchmarks, at the same price point. Developers already on the preview can drop in the new build ID without changing anything else in their code.
Terence Tao says AI is creating a math crisis
At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia this week, Fields Medal winner Terence Tao gave a widely shared talk on what he calls a "proof abundance" problem. AI can now generate valid research-level proofs faster than the field can verify and publish them. In an experiment he ran, frontier models solved 7 of 10 novel research problems under controlled conditions. Tao says this volume of output will eventually overwhelm traditional peer review, and he drew a parallel to the foundational upheaval in early 20th-century mathematics. He is calling for clearer standards around disclosing AI-generated work and for verification systems that can handle the scale.
People keep posting about ChatGPT catching what their doctors missed
r/ChatGPT is full again this week with posts from people saying ChatGPT flagged something serious in their symptoms that their doctors had overlooked. NPR covered this pattern in January and documented verified cases where the chatbot correctly pointed people toward diagnoses their doctors had missed, including rare autoimmune conditions and missed cancer markers. The posts this week follow the same shape. Using AI for health questions still carries real risk, and none of this replaces a doctor, but the number of people finding genuine value in it as a first step is large enough to show up clearly in the feeds.
AI photo apps are having a good week on the charts
Remini, which uses AI to restore and sharpen blurry or old photos, is climbing the charts again, along with several other AI photo editing apps moving up at the same time. Remini has a recurring pattern: someone shares a before-and-after of an old family photo that comes out surprisingly clear, and a new round of people download it. The app is available on iOS and Android, and old family photos from low-quality cameras are its best use case.