😸 Mickey Mouse and Marvel Go AI

gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.

This week: seeking your votes for the best AI automation tools of 2025; how one of this week’s top-5 launches prepped to go live; a founder gets real about emotional burnout; and whose side is Disney on anyway? Plus: some of the top launches from the past week.

Put on the kettle, grab a cuppa, and start reading.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

Earlier this month, we kick-started the 2025 Orbit Awards by naming our top AI dictation apps of 2025. Now, we need your opinions on this year’s best AI automation tools. We’ve already got nominations for products like Zapier, TinyCommand, and Robomotion. What else do we need to be putting in our workflow?

OpenAI had a very busy week.

First, CEO Sam Altman had a wee freakout over ChatGPT’s loss of market share to Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, both of which were released in November. Altman issued an internal “code red.” A few days later, OpenAI moved up its launch of GPT-5.2, which has three modes:

• Instant: I need that answer right now.
• Thinking: I need a plan or a code, but I’ll brew some coffee while I wait for a better answer. 
• Pro: I have a really difficult question, so let me take a nap while you do all the legwork for me.

GPT-5.2 now wins most of OpenAI’s own benchmarks, but R&D World ran a side-by-side comparison of six of the most common benchmarks. Here were the winners:

• SWE-bench Verified (coding): Claude Opus 4.5
• GPQA Diamond (science): Gemini 3 Deep Think
• AIME 2025 (math, no tools): GPT-5.2 Thinking/Pro
• ARC-AGI-2 (abstract reasoning): GPT-5.2 Pro
• Humanity’s Last Exam (academic-level reasoning): Gemini 3 Deep Think
• FrontierMath Tier 1-3: GPT-5.2 Thinking

At the moment, Anthropic’s Claude remains the gold standard for coding, which is in line with Product Hunt users’ opinions. But OpenAI has upped its game on math and reasoning. 

OpenAI didn’t just make moves on the LLM front. It also moved forward on AI-generated video. Here’s what happened:

The same day OpenAI released 5.2, it announced a deal with Disney. The House of Mouse is taking a $1B stake in the company and will “become a major customer of OpenAI.” It’s also licensing over 200 characters from its extensive IP library. That means that Sora users will soon be able to dream up a video of Buzz Lightyear and Woody sumo wrestling in a tub of mayonnaise without running into any legal issues (as long as Hellman’s doesn’t get involved). Disney+ will even feature some of the videos.

The move obviously injects some life into OpenAI, but it also turns one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world into a surrogate. To wit, the day before the announcement, Disney issued Google a cease-and-desist over copyright infringement on its Gemini 3 model. 

Sure, maybe Google will end up signing a similar licensing deal with Disney. But for now, here’s where things stand on AI video generation:

Sora does text-to-video and image-to-video for up to one minute. It is now included in ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscriptions. Google’s Veo goes longer than a minute and comes bundled with Gemini subscriptions. But only one lets Disney adults geek out with Goofy.

Boris Gostroverhov, founder of ProblemHunt, last month shared his story of spinning a decade of startup failures into success. Across a decade of trial and error, he launched 18 different products. What he didn’t share was the loneliness and emotional burnout that would bubble up every few months.

He notes that “founders have no one to talk to when they’re emotionally struggling.” AI therapists lack human empathy, videos are one-way, and mastermind groups can turn competitive. He’s looking for solutions to a problem that touches many founders yet few talk about. Want to crack it?

Tetiana Hryshmanovskaabe is product manager for MultiDrive, the disk backup tool that hit #1 for the day last week. 

How’d MultiDrive do it? Tetiana shares the playbook MultiDrive used, but we’ll give you a hint: It didn’t start on launch day. In her forum post, she shares her thoughts on:

• What you get from being present on Product Hunt daily
• Why you should find a hunter
• How to pick a launch day