Weekly AI news for engineers, executives, and enthusiasts.

Ox Alpha is a multimodal GLM model by Z.ai: Apple Mini and Studio desktops target AI power users

Perplexity moves its computer use agent to on-device models. OpenAI’s Jalapeño may be faster than Nvidia’s best chips. Inside Thomson, Thomson Reuters’ model for law, news, and tax info. T-Rex, a robotics model that knows how to use its hands.

What we know about preview model Ox Alpha: An experimental model takes DeepSeek-V4-Flash multimodal

GLM-5.3 jumps to top of open weight leaderboards. Harvey’s Tenet offers law firms a specialized model. OpenAI introduces safety program for data-conscious customers. New Google research gives the transformer a makeover.

Agents Come to Speech Recognition: AgenticASR incorporates user corrections to edit speech recognition on the fly

Most speech-to-text systems transcribe speech in a single pass, which makes them unable to correct errors in their outputs. Researchers built a system that allows for interactive corrections.

Qwen3.8-Max Lands With A Bang: Inside Alibaba's two new models, Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B

Open models are getting larger and more capable. A few weeks ago, Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3, the largest and best-performing open weights model yet. Last week, Alibaba answered by releasing weights for a giant of its own. 

How Claude’s Watermarks Work: Anthropic details new invisible marking system for future versions of Claude

Anthropic introduced invisible, machine-readable signals that text and images were generated by Claude.

Grok’s Cursor Alliance Pays Off: Grok 4.6 rivals Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol at a lower price

Once a lab that produced mid-tier models, SpaceXAI has steadily improved. It just built one of the most capable models in the world while keeping prices relatively low.

The AI Engineering Skills Map In Detail — Building and Deploying AI Applications: What You Need to Know to Make AI Applications Work in Real Life

I previously wrote about our AI Engineering Skills Map, with the highest level skills being (i) Building and deploying AI applications, (ii) Software engineering fundamentals, (iii) Using coding agents, and (iv) Shaping the build. In this letter, I will flesh out the first of them.

Anthropic’s Watermarks, Grok 4.6 Surges, Qwen’s Open Weights, Better Corrections for Speech Recognition

The Batch News & Insights: I previously wrote about our AI Engineering Skills Map, with the highest level skills being (i) Building and deploying...

AI Can Help Heal Romantic Distress: Inside overit, a study of chatbot therapy after breakups

Chatbots that are designed to treat mental health issues typically require multiple sessions, posing a risk that users will drop out before they receive much benefit. Researchers showed that chatbots can provide relief in a single session.

Minimax’s State-of-the-Art Video Model Is Only Minimally Open: Minimax H3's weights are free, but carry unusual restrictions

A free-to-download model sets a new standard for video generation and editing, but its license comes with unexpected restrictions.

Google’s Robotics Model Has Legs: Gemini Robotics 2 gets Google closer to true multi-embodiment

Google’s latest vision-language-action model can walk a humanoid robot across a room, crouch to a low shelf, and close a five-fingered hand around a light bulb.

Muse Code Wants Your Data: Meta's Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code approach the intelligence frontier at a discount

Meta will cut coding bills from dollars to pennies for developers who let the company learn from their work.