Weekly AI news for engineers, executives, and enthusiasts.

Qwen announces new open-weights flagship update: GLM-5 is open and built for agents

OpenClaw creator joins OpenAI. Gemini DeepThink sets new science and reasoning marks. OpenAI partners with Cerebras for Codex-Spark. Hollywood sends cease-and-desists to Bytedance.

xAI Blasts Off: SpaceX acquires xAI, announces plans for data centers In space

Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI, opening the door to richer financing of the merged entity’s AI research, a tighter focus on space applications of AI, and — if Musk’s dreams are realized — solar-powered data centers in space.

Claude Opus 4.6 Reasons More Over Harder Problems: Anthropic updates flagship model, places first on Intelligence Index

Anthropic updated its flagship large language model to handle longer, more complex agentic tasks.

Toward Consistent Auditing of AI: OpenAI alumni found Averi to set standards for AI model audits

AI is becoming ubiquitous, yet no standards exist for auditing its safety and security to make sure AI systems don’t assist, say, hackers or terrorists. A new organization aims to change that.

More Robust Medical Diagnoses: Inside Dr Cabot, an agent trained to diagnose complex conditions

AI models that diagnose illnesses typically generate diagnoses based on descriptions of symptoms. In practice, though, doctors must be able to explain their reasoning and plan next steps. Researchers built a system that accomplishes these tasks.

Why Hollywood Worries About AI: Filmmakers at At the Sundance Film Festival expressed anxiety about AI. But Hollywood can benefit from AI, and the two communities have interests in common.

I recently spoke at the Sundance Film Festival on a panel about AI.

Claude Opus 4.6 Thinks Smarter, xAI Joins SpaceX, AI Outperforms Doctors, Standardized AI Audits

The Batch AI News and Insights: I recently spoke at the Sundance Film Festival on a panel about AI.

Seedance creates new movie-making interface: Even top models struggle at identifying visual specifics

The future of ads in ChatGPT. AI stresses in high-tech workplaces. Big models’ curse of multilingual training. Opus 4.6’s expensive fast mode.

Claude Opus 4.6 pushes the envelope: GPT-5.3-Codex shines on agentic coding and game building

Hugging Face’s community approach to benchmarks. Four cloud companies’ plans to spend $650 billion this year. A new proof of an old math problem. Frontier, OpenAI’s enterprise agent system.

How AI Is Affecting the Job Market — And What You Can Do About It: Worries that AI is taking peoples’ jobs have been overblown, but AI is changing the job market. Here’s what to expect and what employers are looking for.

Job seekers in the U.S. and many other nations face a tough environment.

Recipe for Smaller, Capable Models: Mistral uses cascade distillation on Mistral 3 to build Ministral family

Mistral compressed Mistral Small 3.1 into much smaller versions, yielding a family of relatively small, open-weights, vision-language models that perform better by some measures than competing models of similar size. The method combines pruning and distillation.

AI Giants Share Wikipedia’s Costs: Wikimedia Foundation strikes deals with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity

On its 25th anniversary, Wikipedia celebrated with high-profile deals to make its data easier for AI companies to train their models in exchange for financial support.