This Thursday is Thanksgiving, and there is a lot to be grateful for, not the least of which is the Lower Alabama AI community.

When we started LA-AI, I honestly wasn’t sure what would happen. Would anyone show up (I still worry about that)? Would people actually care about building an AI community in Lower Alabama? Turns out the answer was a resounding yes, and that still surprises me in the best possible way.

So before we get into anything technical this week, I want to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who’s walked through the door at a meetup for the first time. Thank you to those of you who’ve become regulars and started mentoring others. Thank you to the businesses who trusted a bunch of strangers with their real problems at Hatch-a-thon. And thank you to everyone reading this newsletter, whether you’re local or following along from somewhere else entirely.

This community isn’t something I built. It’s something we’re building together. And I’m grateful to be part of it.

Speaking of community, two quick announcements. First, registrations are now open for Hatch-a-thon Winter 2026. The kickoff is January 15th, with demo night on January 29th. Head over to the Hatch-a-thon site to learn more and sign up. As a reminder, registration for the hatch-a-thon is completely free. Second, our December meetup is coming up on Friday, December 5th at 3:30 PM at 314 Magnolia Ave in Fairhope. It’s the last meetup of the year, and it’d be great to see a big crowd to close out 2025.

Now, for those of you keeping tabs on what’s happening in AI, the past two weeks have been a whirlwind. OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.1 in early November with a focus on being warmer and more conversational. Google followed with Gemini 3 Pro last week, which is absolutely crushing the benchmarks for multimodal understanding. And then just yesterday, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, claiming the crown for coding and agentic tasks. Three major model releases in two weeks. All of them representing genuine leaps forward, not just incremental updates.

What strikes me isn’t just the technical improvements. It’s the pace. These companies are pushing each other forward at a speed that would’ve seemed impossible even a year ago. The competition is fierce, and we’re the ones who benefit from it.

If you haven’t tried the latest versions of these tools recently, this is a good week to poke around. Each one has its own personality and strengths. Play with them. See what clicks for you.

Happy Thanksgiving. See you December 5th in Fairhope

Know someone who’d enjoy this?

Don’t miss the next issue.