Weekly AI news for engineers, executives, and enthusiasts.

GPT-5.6 will see a wider release this week: China’s government moves to control its companies’ AI products

Copilot will decrease reliance on GPT, Claude. Claude Cowork gets web, mobile implementations. Nvidia’s Audex blends audio and voice with text intelligence. OpenAI mini voice model promises to keep costs low.

Alibaba and ByteDance quash human-like bots: And, in case you missed it: some recent under-the-radar news

Seedance 2.5, the movie industry’s favorite video generator. Field-specific knowledge helps Claude code users most. DiffusionGemma, Google’s fast, capable text generator. Regular use of AI chatbots rises among Americans.

Better Reward Models for Robots: Inside RoboReward, a family of vision-language reward models that train robots to take action

When you’re training a robot via reinforcement learning, a handcrafted reward function is labor-intensive to build but often dispenses rewards more effectively than a general-purpose reward model based on a vision-language model. Researchers built reward models that narrowed the gap.

Microsoft Strikes Out on Its Own: Microsoft revealed MAI-Thinking-1, a Claude Sonnet 4.6-sized reasoning model developed without distillation

Microsoft, once OpenAI’s exclusive partner and still a major reseller of other companies’ AI models, built its own reasoning model from scratch.

Fugu Blends Models Task by Task: Sakana debuted dedicated orchestrator models, Fugu and Fugu-Ultra, that spawn Claude, Gemini, and GPT agents

Models that orchestrate the activities of other models and agents achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of benchmarks, outperforming the best individual models working alone.

GPT-5.6 Lands in Limbo: OpenAI previewed three GPT-5.6 Models (Sol, Terra, and Luna), wider release coming soon

OpenAI announced a preview of its GPT-5.6 family, including a top-tier model comparable to Claude 5 Mythos — but so far it’s available only to users that are selected by the U.S. government.

How We Decide What Courses to Teach: The AI world is full of hype and sales pitches. DeepLearning.AI focuses on most important tools and techniques in ways you can apply to any AI vendor’s ecosystem.

The AI world has become incredibly noisy. Social media, traditional media, and an army of marketers produce a cacophony of hype and content that are often secretly sales pitches for their products.

OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Family, New Ways to Train Robots, Models Invoking Models

The Batch News & Insights: The AI world has become incredibly noisy. Social media, traditional media, and an army of marketers produce a cacophony of hype and content that are often secretly sales pitches for their products.

U.S. lifts export controls on Claude models: The mid-tier is back with Claude Sonnet 5

Claude Science, a workbench for biological research. Gemini’s Nano Banana 2 Lite and Omni Flash. Devin Fusion pairs a top model with an inexpensive sidekick. OpenClaw’s iOS and Android controller applications.

Anthropic Opus 4.8 Leaps Forward: Claude Opus 4.8 won back the high-performance crown for Anthropic, pending wider availability of its Mythos-class models

Anthropic mid-2026 update of Opus held the the top of a leading intelligence ranking for about a week, only to be overtaken by Claude Fable 5.

GPT-5.6 arrives, but only for approved partners: Gemini 3.5 Flash adds computer use to its toolkit

Brain2Qwerty V2 translates brain waves to text. Claude Mythos 5 restored for 100+ vendors. U.S. government gates access to GPT-5.6. IBM unveils 0.7nm-wide transistor design.

Biological Molecules as Language: ESMFold2 approaches AlphaFold 3 performance but with an open, Transformer-based architecture

Google’s AlphaFold models pioneered the task of finding the shapes of biologically active molecules, opening new pathways for drug development.