News, p. 4
News
427 stories · page 4 of 48Google launches Guided Vision in Gemini Live: the camera says out loud what is in front of a blind user
You point the phone, Gemini tells you what it sees and how to move the frame. The feature is for blind and low-vision people and works on Android 9 and up wherever Gemini Live is available. Google states plainly that it is not a medical device and does not replace the white cane.
Read →Boston Dynamics shows the new Atlas hand: 13 degrees of freedom and no pinky
Four fingers, one actuator type, touch sensors on the fingertips and palm, a load of over 100 pounds. The pinky is gone because the CTO asked the team to tape their two small fingers together for a day and report what they could not do. Per IEEE Spectrum, the goal now is how to make 100,000 of these hands a year.
Read →Ryan Roslansky leaves Microsoft after nearly 18 years: the job wants Redmond, his life is in the Bay Area
The Executive Vice President of LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 is leaving and stays on as an advisor until the end of the year. The reason is in his own words: the next phase requires being in Redmond every day, and his family is in the Bay Area. His teams move to Charles Lamanna, Jacob Andreou and directly to Satya Nadella.
Read →JetBrains puts Air into its IDEs: several agents at once, all sessions in one place, on a double Ctrl
Air is an "open system" for agentic development, in early access from 1 October through the 2026.3 EAP builds or as a Marketplace plugin. You run several agents in parallel, locally or in the cloud, each in its own temporary worktree. A JetBrains AI subscription is not mandatory: Junie Lite is free after signing in, and you bring your own Codex, Gemini, GitHub Copilot or Claude Agent.
Read →Suno launches Speech: spoken word and background music in one track, in beta for everyone
You type a text, describe the voice and the musical style, and get it read aloud with its own soundtrack. Suno calls it the first audio model that makes voice and music together as one piece. The beta has been open to the whole community since 1 October.
Read →ComfyUI launches Comfy Agent: describe what you want and it builds, runs and fixes the workflow next to you
The agent lives inside ComfyUI, knows the latest models and extensions, and works on the same canvas while you edit by hand. Available in Comfy Cloud since 1 October; the desktop version follows in a few weeks. It is a beta.
Read →GPT-6 Astra now has an Ultrafast mode: up to 8x faster generation, per NVIDIA
The mode runs on NVIDIA Blackwell and is available in the OpenAI API and to eligible ChatGPT Work and Codex users. OpenAI has no announcement of its own in its newsroom; the number is in NVIDIA's blog, with quotes from two OpenAI people, and in OpenAI's API documentation. OpenAI's documentation adds the condition that, for us, comes first: US or global processing only, no EU endpoints.
Read →Study at Apple: a strong model with a minimal harness keeps up with elaborate agent scaffolding on an equal time budget
A paper published on Apple Machine Learning Research and on arXiv compares the best open-source harnesses for autonomous ML engineering with a single coding agent that has only read, write and bash. Under an equal time budget and the same model, the scaffolding gives no advantage. The authors conclude that hand-crafted harnesses around strong models yield poor returns.
Read →Barclays expects half of its developers to be using Claude Code by the end of the year
On 1 October Anthropic said British bank Barclays is expanding their collaboration and rolling Claude out across the bank. Barclays expects Claude Code to reach 50 percent of its developers by the end of 2026 and a majority of its software engineers in 2027.
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