OpenAI's standalone Codex application for Mac computers achieved a significant milestone, surpassing one million downloads in its first week, according to VentureBeat. This rapid adoption mirrors the explosive growth of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022. The surge in downloads followed the February 2nd release of the app and the underlying GPT-5.3-Codex model, signaling a 60% week-over-week growth in overall Codex users.
While OpenAI celebrates this initial success, the company is also indicating a shift away from unlimited free access to its most powerful tools, as reported by VentureBeat. This suggests a move toward a more restricted model for its AI applications.
The rapid advancements in AI are also highlighting challenges in infrastructure. According to VentureBeat, enterprises are investing heavily in GPU infrastructure for AI workloads, but these expensive resources are often underutilized. Mark Menger, a solutions architect at F5, stated, "They're capable of more work. They're waiting on data." The bottleneck isn't the hardware itself, but rather the data delivery layer between storage and compute, which is often overlooked.
Meanwhile, the rise of AI is also impacting the way people work. A study by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business, published in HBR, found that AI doesn't necessarily reduce work, but rather intensifies it. The study, conducted from April to December 2025, involved 200 employees at a U.S.-based technology company. The researchers observed a new rhythm in which workers managed multiple active threads simultaneously, such as writing code while AI generated alternative versions or reviving deferred tasks.
The rapid development of AI has also led to new challenges in web security. Hacker News reported that some websites are implementing measures to protect themselves from aggressive scraping by AI companies. One such measure is Anubis, a Proof-of-Work scheme designed to make scraping more expensive and deter automated access.
In other news, a social network for bots called Moltbook gained popularity, as reported by MIT Technology Review. Launched on January 28, Moltbook, which billed itself as a place where AI agents could interact, went viral quickly.
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