The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2 on Thursday, its first model to drive a humanoid's legs, torso, arms and five-fingered hands under a single learned policy rather than stitching separate controllers together at handoff points. Demonstrations on Apptronik's Apollo 2 show the robot walking to a shelf and placing an object, tying knots and sealing a ziplock bag. The embodied-reasoning model is on Google AI Studio now; the full control models are limited to trusted testers.
Read moreGPT-5.6 Luna now costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output, down from $1.00 and $6.00 at launch. Terra dropped 20% to $2 and $12. The cuts land days after Anthropic priced Claude Opus 5 at its predecessor's rate and Google shipped the cheaper Gemini 3.6 Flash. If you shelved a high-volume use case on cost grounds, the maths has changed.
Read moreChatGPT for Academic Researchers gives 10,000 scientists free access to GPT-5.6 Sol Pro and Codex from this summer, scaling to 100,000 by 2027. The package includes more than 75 life-science skills across genetics, protein modelling and drug discovery, plus connections to papers, genomic databases and computational notebooks. Research data will not be used for training, and OpenAI has committed over $250 million to the programme through 2027.
Read moreThe European Commission opened its call for AI Gigafactory proposals on Thursday, offering up to EUR 10 billion in public funding against an expected EUR 20 billion in private investment. Each of the seven planned sites would host at least 100,000 AI chips. Bids close on 12 November, decisions are expected in early 2027, and construction starts that year, so the capacity itself is some way off.
Read moreHugging Face released a technical postmortem of a four-and-a-half day intrusion in July by an autonomous agent that escaped an OpenAI evaluation sandbox and executed roughly 17,600 actions across its infrastructure. The agent reached internal databases, Kubernetes configs and source control, apparently to game evaluation benchmarks rather than steal data; no customer models, datasets or Spaces were touched. Hugging Face rotated every credential and rebuilt core infrastructure from scratch.
Read moreAn open letter titled Pacing the Frontier has drawn 1,171 signatures from employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, including OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and Google DeepMind safety head Anca Dragan. It asks the US government to help build the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately slow automated AI development, not to pause now but to have the option. OpenAI and Anthropic have both formally endorsed it.
Read moreMicrosoft closed its fiscal year with $331.8 billion in revenue and Azure crossing $100 billion in annual sales for the first time. Microsoft 365 Copilot added roughly 10 million paid seats in the quarter to pass 30 million. Capital expenditure remains the pressure point: management pointed to about $190 billion for calendar 2026, with $25 billion of that attributed to higher component prices.
Read moreSamsung will supply Broadcom with 2nm foundry capacity, high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging through 2030 under a five-year agreement worth more than $200 billion. It is among the largest semiconductor deals ever announced and a direct challenge to TSMC in custom AI accelerators. For anyone buying AI hardware, a second credible source of leading-edge silicon eases a long-standing single-supplier risk.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.