Weekly AI news for engineers, executives, and enthusiasts.

Planning Generated Images In Stages: Meta improves image models by plotting and revising generations step-by-step

Text-to-image generators that use diffusion or flow-matching typically compose a whole image at once (although they refine the whole image in steps).

Agents Surf the AI-Written Web: Internet traffic driven by AI rripled last year, study shows

AI-driven activity on the internet rose sharply last year, a study shows.

Europe Pauses Some AI Regulations: European Union regulators delay some AI Act provisions, delete others

The European Union weakened some provisions of its landmark AI Act and delayed others after businesses and policymakers argued the law made European companies less competitive.

Gemini 3.5 Flash Pairs Smarts With Speed: Google's updated Flash levels up, approaching top models but raising prices

Google’s faster model brings substantive gains at a substantially higher price, part of a rising trend in prices per token.

Forward Deployed Engineers and the Future of AI Engineering

One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs.

Gemini Flash Gets Pricey, AI Act Delays, Agents Drive Online Traffic

The Batch AI News and Insights: One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs.

DeepSWE claims to measure agents better: Pope Leo XIV calls for AI to “disarm,” consider humanity

DeepSeek’s permanent V4 price cuts. MAI-Image-2.5, currently third on the Arena Leaderboard. Mythos-1’s remarkable security skills. How MCP will change later this year

Qwen3.7-Max, China’s latest top model: OpenAI model disproves key math conjecture

Nvidia’s Gated DeltaNet-2, its latest attention alternative. Trump calls off executive order regulating U.S. AI models. Microsoft’s benchmark-topping suite of computer use agents. Cohere’s Command-A+, a local alternative to big cloud AI.

Toward Agent Benchmarks That Reflect Human Work: AI agents may not be getting better at full range of economically valuable labor

AI agents seem to be increasingly capable of performing economically valuable tasks, but current benchmarks measure this capability only narrowly.

Cybersecurity Alarms Grow Louder: Google study shows LLM-generated malware is getting harder to track and stop

An AI-generated script to bypass two-factor authentication signals a dawning era of industrial-scale cyberattacks, according to a Google report.

Built-In Conversational Interactivity: Thinking Machines reveals its first interaction model, a new type of multimodal AI

Conversational models typically wait for a turn before they respond.

Hermes Agent Challenges OpenClaw: OpenClaw created a class of personal agents; upstart Hermes Agent is outworking it

OpenClaw, the immensely popular AI agent, has fast-rising competition.