Weekly AI news for engineers, executives, and enthusiasts.

Minimax’s M3.1 Flash Cuts Prices: Critical PHP bug found by AI affects majority of web sites

Mercury 3, diffusion-based alternative to Claude Haiku. d1-ultra, a highly accurate decision model. Using OpenAI’s models to rewrite and repair legacy code. llm-d, an all-around optimizer for serving open models.

Muse Spark Open leads U.S. open models: Reflection releases weights for Beam, a much-anticipated model

Grok Voice 3.0 leads voice-to-voice benchmarks. Nvidia 3.5 Super VL is faster, more capable than Lightning. DeepSeek-V-4.1-Flash pushes strong update. Meta amends controversial Muse scraping terms.

Data Mixing, Minus the Guesswork: Research from the team behind CausalMix offers a technique to select fine-tuning examples

When you’re building a fine-tuning dataset, finding a mix of subject domains that yields a high-performing model can require expensive trial and error, because fine-tuned performance also depends on the quality of the individual examples.

Computers Built for Local AI: Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio have competition from Microsoft and Nvidia

Developers have warmed to the economics and security of local models, either as an alternative or a complement to the cloud.

Mistral’s Sovereign Appeal: Mistral Large 4, the leading European AI model, outperforms all open models outside of China

Mistral’s latest model is its largest and most capable, and the most powerful yet released by a European company.

Claude Fills Out Its Model Family: Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 give developers fast, highly capable alternatives to Opus 5.5

Claude Haiku, Anthropic’s fastest and least expensive model gets a long-awaited update.

Formal Verification Meets Unverifiable Judgement: Don’t Overgeneralize from Progress in Math and Code — The Hardest AI Problems Still Require More Work

The gulf between LLM performance on verifiable tasks vs. unverifiable tasks that require judgement is larger than most people realize.

Claude Haiku 5.5, Mistral Large 4, and Local Models for Mac and Windows

The Batch News & Insights: The gulf between LLM performance on verifiable tasks vs. unverifiable tasks that require judgement is larger than most people realize.

Meta’s Muse Wonder rivals top models: Inside Amazon’s warehouse robotics operations

Microsoft says it will use own chips for Copilot, MAI. Gemini 4 Argon generally available. Python 3.15 is official, Python 3.10 no longer supported. Character.AI declares bankruptcy.

Anthropic gives Claude Haiku a big update: Microsoft-Decision-1 responds to Jev and OpenAI

OpenAI accounting projects $50B annual revenue. Nvidia and Microsoft team up on Windows laptops. Microsoft announces AI-optimized mini-desktop. OpenAI responds to criticism of ChatGPT for Teens.

Pick the Right Tools for the Right Job: Researchers designed HYSET, a technique to call collections of tools that work together

When an LLM agent can choose among thousands of tools, picking the right ones for a given task is difficult.

Video Models Steer Robots: Black Forest Labs’ Flux 3 Action applies video expertise to a World-Action Model

Many companies that build image and video generators have pivoted to robotics, extending their expertise in world models to action.