“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones

Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk

• <p><strong><a href="https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/">Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk</a></strong></p> Mistral are back in the game. Today they're releasing a preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter, 49 billion active parameter model trained on their own cluster of 3,800 NVI

Claude Haiku 5.5

• <p>As previously <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/28/claude-sonnet-5-5/">promised</a>, here's Anthropic's new fast, low cost model: <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5">Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5</a>.</p> <p>The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came

Mistral's 1T-parameter open-weight Large 4 beats closed frontier models while Claude quietly embeds itself inside Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

• Mistral Large 4 ('Le Chonk'): 1T params, 49B active (MoE), 1M context, multimodal, open weights dropping end of October — API live now at $1.36/M input, $4.18/M output
• Claude now embeds directly in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides via Workspace Marketplace add-on — live editing, formula writing, Python-on-sheets, suggestion-card review flow
• OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts (372 paper families) from an unreleased model, with Lean-verified proofs, after Fields Medalists pushed for oversight
• Anthropic launched a Claude Startups program offering $45,000 in credits and tooling
• New open-source tools: Matt DesLauriers' faster browser vector-graphics renderer, and a real-time monitor for Claude Code/Codex agents
• Uncensored GLM-5.3-Flash fine-tune released for red-teaming use cases

Anthropic is bleeding major enterprise customers (Pentagon, Microsoft, Meta) right before its $2T IPO, while open-weight models from Mistral, Google, and Reflection AI offer credible escape routes from vendor lock-in.

• Pentagon officially stopped using Claude after blacklisting Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year
• Microsoft cut its planned $1B+ internal Anthropic spend by more than a third, shifting to its own tools
• Meta halved its Claude Code seats from 60,000 to 30,000, citing layoffs and internal tool adoption
• Anthropic still targets a $2T IPO valuation before Thanksgiving despite a $42B loss in 2025
• Mistral launched Large 4 ('le Chonk'), a 1T-parameter open-weight model pitched explicitly as insurance against being locked into a closed provider
• Google (EmbeddingGemma 2) and Reflection AI (Beam) both shipped new US-based open models this week, narrowing the gap with Chinese open-source labs

Reflection AI's Beam proves sparse MoE models can match frontier performance at a fraction of the compute cost, while OpenAI quietly makes watermarking mandatory infrastructure for EU users.

• Reflection AI released Beam: 501B total params but only 23B active (MoE), Apache 2.0 licensed, FP8/NVFP4 formats, 1M token context, 3-4x cheaper to run than GLM-5.2 despite GLM having 250B fewer active params — full weights drop this month
• OpenAI launched textGrain, an invisible watermark for ChatGPT/Codex outputs to comply with EU AI Act; auto-enabled for EU users, opt-in elsewhere; detector access restricted to approved researchers; editing ~25% of words drops detection to 17%
• Vals AI ran 90 Claude agents for 3 days to simulate materials science and surfaced two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates, including one (KV[Cr(CN)6]) synthesized in 1999 but never tested for this property
• DeepSeek open-sourced its GPU math library, claiming a 98% cut in token costs for compatible workloads
• Multiverse Computing released an optimized Whisper Large V3 Turbo claimed to be 15x cheaper than comparable speech-to-text APIs
• FlashAttention-3 has a reported hidden BF16 bug that silently corrupts training after ~25B tokens — worth checking if you're fine-tuning at scale

Multimodal open d1 decision models for the edge

Google rolls out improved SynthID AI content detector, now available globally

Scrimshaw Jukebox

• <p><strong>Tool:</strong> <a href="https://tools.simonwillison.net/scrimshaw-jukebox">Scrimshaw Jukebox</a></p> <p>I wanted to see if Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, so <a href="https://claude.ai/share/1f721c20-2499-4d23-b368-3ab57146d956">I tried this</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><code>I want you

Microsoft event debuts new AI-friendly hardware and Windows changes

llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0

• <p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/simonw/llm-openai-decisions/releases/tag/0.1a0">llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0</a></p> <p>OpenAI released their new Jev-style <a href="https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/decisions">Decisions API</a>, as previously announced at last week

llm-mistral 0.16

• <p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/simonw/llm-mistral/releases/tag/0.16">llm-mistral 0.16</a></p> <p>Adds support for reasoning models, such as the newly released <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/6/le-chonk/">Mistral Large 4</a>.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwi

EmbeddingGemma 2

• <p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980487#49983751">My comment</a> on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980487">EmbeddingGemma 2</a> &mdash; Hacker News.</p><p>I really appreciate that <a href="https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/embeddingg

Anthropic's hardware standard is quietly becoming the 'MCP for physical devices' while Meta Muse's relationship-mapping feature reveals how deep agent context-gathering can go.

• Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard (MHS), announced quietly in August as 'MCP for hardware,' received 30x more organization sign-ups than planned, spanning semiconductors, manufacturing, aerospace, and lab automation — early results include QuEra stabilizing quantum computer lasers (695/700 success) and Carnegie Mellon running autonomous iterative lab experiments
• Meta Muse builds detailed 'pages' on every person in a user's life (facts, history, relationship-strengthening tips) via hourly background processes — Meta says it's opt-in and sandboxed per user, but researchers call the depth of relationship-mapping 'creepy'
• Sam Altman publicly distances OpenAI from Anthropic's risk posture, stating OpenAI accepts 'bad things happening' for AI's benefits and rejects the idea of 'catastrophic risk' or loss of control — a clearer articulation of the two labs' diverging regulatory philosophies
• Both OpenAI and Anthropic still signed Trump's non-binding 'superintelligence' safety accord despite this philosophical split, showing alignment on optics even as risk tolerance diverges
• GPT-6 Astra took the #1 spot across 4 Design Arena leaderboards and ChatGPT ranks #1 in a16z's Top 100 consumer AI apps — competitive signal for anyone benchmarking creative/design model quality
• Cohere shipped its biggest update yet (North 2) with 15+ new enterprise features, continuing the push toward agentic enterprise tooling