‘Welcome to the AGI era’: OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra
The rumors were true, all of them (and then some): OpenAI today is releasing GPT-6 Astra, a new frontier model that the company says likely marks the onset of artificial generalized intelligence (AGI), its long sought goal of “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” In a closed a press briefing […]
China-linked hackers backdoored executives’ laptops via USB, exploiting a fix companies had but weren’t using
A Chinese state-linked hacking group compromised executive laptops at an agricultural industry conference on Hainan Island this spring — not through phishing or a network breach, but by breaking into hotel rooms and booting the machines from a USB stick while the executives were at dinner. CrowdStrike, which tracks the group as OVERCAST PANDA, disclosed […]
Meta says Muse Spark 1.3 has frontier performance — but its best results come from a model developers can’t broadly use yet
Meta’s newest AI model Muse Spark 1.3, unveiled yesterday, is faster and more performant on third-party benchmarks than its predecessor — with a caveat. “Muse Spark 1.3 is rolling out today with frontier performance almost too cheap to meter,” Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X, calling it Meta’s “biggest jump” yet in […]
The AI visibility gap: Why great brands disappear from AI answers
Presented by Contentful Most marketing teams still measure visibility the same way they always have: rankings, click-through rates, and organic traffic. But buyers have moved on. Search tools and AI engines now synthesize answers directly on the screen, creating a world of zero-click searches where your website is entirely bypassed. The “old days” are not […]
Microsoft AI’s MAI-Transcribe-2 undercuts OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on price and speed
Microsoft AI on Thursday released MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-recognition model the company says is faster, more accurate, and cheaper than anything OpenAI, Google, or ElevenLabs currently sells. Then it priced the thing at 10 cents per hour of audio. That figure deserves a pause. When Microsoft AI shipped the first model in this line just five […]
Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash is built for agents, while its Cyber twin hunts vulnerabilities
Google keeps cranking out Flash models: the company on Wednesday announced two versions of a new 3.8 Flash. The variants include a standard Flash, a “workhorse” model for agentic tasks, software development, and multi-step reasoning, and Flash Cyber optimized for vulnerability detection and mitigation. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an X post that 3.8 […]
Meta prices Muse Voice Transcribe at $0.18 an hour, with real-time diarization for 20+ speakers: a steal for enterprises?
Meta is entering the increasingly competitive real-time speech-to-text market with Muse Voice Transcribe, a new audio perception model that combines streaming transcription, endpoint detection and speaker diarization for more than 20 speakers — at a public API price of just $0.18 per hour of processed audio. Developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, Muse is designed to […]
Closing an Azure OpenAI assistant’s retrieval gap didn’t take a new identity platform. It took one filter and a narrower assistant.
Egiziago Cioffi is the IT and Enterprise Architect and CEO of SynSphere Italia, a Microsoft partner based in Milan. He built an agent himself. He wrote the indexing job, configured the Azure OpenAI retrieval pipeline, connected it to SharePoint, and watched it pass every evaluation his team ran. His Azure OpenAI email assistant auto-resolves about […]
Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 arrive with a 75% cost reduction for Fable cache reads
It’s only the first day of September 2026, but the month and fall season are already off to the races in AI land, as Anthropic has just released its latest and most powerful large language models yet — Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1. The two names refer to the same underlying model. Fable […]
Frontier models can recover up to 65% of facts they can’t directly recall — just by thinking longer
When large language models (LLMs) hallucinate, developers typically assume the model lacks the required facts. Engineering teams diagnose the error as missing knowledge. The standard response is to increase model size, expand training data, or build complex retrieval architectures. A new study by researchers at Google Research and Technion demonstrates that the knowledge is often […]