Happy Sunday, !
Welcome back to your weekly AI news roundup.
In case you missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday post:
The Best AI Benchmark Is Your Own Work
TL;DR Benchmarks can’t fully show if a new model is good at what matters to you, so have AI turn something you actually do into a quick test.
Note: If you’re consistently missing out on my emails, remember to check your “Promotions” tab and mark whytryai@substack.com as a “Safe Sender.”
Here’s what happened in AI last week:
👩💻 AI releases
Anthropic news:
Claude Dashboards creates live dashboards from your data, while Claude Motion turns ideas and research into short animated explainers.
Claude for Google Workspace puts Claude in a sidebar inside Docs, Sheets, and Slides, where it can help you edit and work with the open files.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is the fastest and cheapest small Claude model yet, and it now also lets you adjust how hard it thinks.
Google news:
AI Edge Foresight is an experimental Mac app that transcribes your meetings and turns rough notes into polished details, and can work entirely offline.
Nano Banana 2.1 is an upgraded image model with better text rendering and character consistency, now available in AI Mode, Flow, and the Gemini app.
Playground lets anyone create, play, and share their own games just by describing them.
SynthID Detector now makes it easy for anyone to check whether an image, video, or audio clip has an AI watermark from Google or its partners.
Hark launched Hark Pro, a free AI assistant app that can take care of errands like booking rides, ordering groceries, and paying bills.
OpenAI news:
GPT-6 is rolling out to all users and comes with Intelligent UI that adds interactive elements like buttons, charts, diagrams, and more into its answers.
GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast lets you run GPT-6.1 Sol up to eight times faster in ChatGPT Work, Codex, and the API.
Meetings is a beta ChatGPT plugin for Mac that takes notes on your calls without a bot joining and saves summaries and next steps.
SpaceXAI gave Grok Bot the ability to search, read, and monitor X, so you can have it track breaking news or product feedback on your behalf.
🔬 AI research
Instinct made its AI agent available in group chats for early-access users, so it can buy tickets, plan trips, and sort out carpools for the entire group.
Midjourney is testing a Thinking Mode that reruns your images with extra reasoning to improve coherence, prompt accuracy, and text rendering.
Mistral released Mistral Large 4 in public preview, its largest and most capable model yet, with open weights coming out by the end of this month.
Reflection previewed Beam, an open-weight model built for coding and agent tasks, with early access available now and full weights coming later this month.
📖 AI resources
“ATLAS: Evaluating Agents on Search-Intensive Tasks” [BENCHMARK]: how accurately and completely do AI agents handle real-world search-based tasks.
“Can AI automate Epoch?” [REPORT]: Epoch AI’s test of whether six top AI models can handle real research and chart-making work from its own team.
“Disrupting AI-enabled false front operations” [REPORT]: how Russian and Iranian influence campaigns used ChatGPT to run fake think tanks and journalists.
“Humanity’s Sixth Sense” [BENCHMARK]: Scale’s benchmark that tests whether AI models can make human-like intuitive calls by glancing at images and videos.
🔀 AI random
SpaceXAI will let Grok Bot start using rival models like Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney, and Suno when they’re the best fit for a given task.
The Wikimedia Foundation found that “rogue” OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits to its wikis and unsuccessfully tried to exploit one of its tools.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
Wow, way to leave the poor guy hanging.
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