From the archive
AI tools help people write software, search information, create content and automate parts of their work. Find news on developer tools, coding assistants, open-source projects and software for running AI locally. Our coverage explains what each tool does, how access and pricing work, and which practical limits or security considerations matter before you add it to a workflow.
Lead story
Atoms, the robotics company founded by former Uber chief Travis Kalanick, has hired former Meta AI executive Vikas Chandra as its vice president of AI. Chandra says he will build “foundation models for the physical world”, designed to help machines understand and act in real-world environments. That matters…
Read the report & discussion ↗Anthropic Watch
Claude Code v2.1.271 arrives with a practical split personality: it makes some remote sessions faster, while tightening the controls around what an AI coding agent can do. The release adds fast mode to Claude Code Remote sessions where an organisation permits it, plus per-command alloweddomains for Bash, PowerShell…
llama.cpp Watch
llama.cpp 0.4.1 expands the local AI workbench with three new model architectures, a substantial batch of inference and server fixes, and a refresh of its underlying ggml engine. The practical point is simple: more models and more awkward real-world workloads now have a route through the same increasingly…
AWS AI Watch
The most expensive AI customisation mistake may be reaching for training before proving that a better prompt or a small retrieval layer would do the job. AWS has published an eight-step framework that starts with using a model as-is and ends with building a custom model from scratch.
NVIDIA Watch
Perplexity Portable Computer is now available on Windows PCs with compatible NVIDIA GeForce RTX and RTX PRO graphics. The local AI agent can analyse files, handle multistep tasks and work across connected services without sending every document to a cloud chatbot.
DeepSeek Watch
Chinese AI labs are narrowing the gap with US rivals by squeezing more useful work from less computing power. That matters because the contest is shifting from who can buy the largest pile of chips to who can make each token earn its keep.
Watch Desk
Cognition has expanded Devin Fusion across Devin Desktop and CLI, pairing a frontier-class planning model with a cheaper model that executes the work. The important idea is not merely “two models good”: each keeps its own context, so planning can continue while code is being written. Cognition says…
Watch Desk
Mistral has raised €3bn in a Series D led by Samsung Electronics, at a post-money valuation above €21bn. The French AI company says the money will expand frontier research, compute capacity, infrastructure and its international commercial footprint. That is the concrete shift: Europe’s open-weight challenger now has serious…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA is using its own supply-chain decisions to train a specialised AI model that recommends where constrained components should go. The practical twist is the important bit: the model is being taught not just the numbers, but the human reasoning behind them.
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI’s Codex 0.154.0 is a sizeable step for its AI coding agent: GPT-6-Astra is now available in the model picker and Amazon Bedrock catalogues. The release also adds experimental managed worktrees, inline questions during active runs and a shared background server for Windows sessions.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic has released Claude Code v2.1.265, a broad maintenance update for its AI coding agent. The practical headline is reliability: plugins should be easier to discover, large tool outputs are now bounded, and several failure modes around agents, sessions and MCP connections have been repaired.
Alibaba Qwen Watch
Qwen Code v0.23.3 adds an OpenAI Responses API content generator and lets a subagent hand a turn to an external agent over ACP, with Claude Code named as the first hand-off target. The practical point is a coding agent that is easier to connect, inspect and recover when…
Alibaba Qwen Watch
Qwen Code Desktop v0.3.0-preview.0 landed on 10 September with a notably connective upgrade: it can generate content through the OpenAI Responses API and delegate a subagent turn to an external agent over ACP, with Claude Code first in line. For developers, Qwen’s desktop workbench is widening beyond a…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published a deployment guide for Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, showing how to serve the open-weight model on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod with vLLM. The practical headline is that a 2.4-trillion-parameter model can be made usable on one ml.p6-b300.48xlarge instance with eight NVIDIA B300 GPUs, using NVFP4 quantisation and an…
Moonshot AI/Kimi Watch
Kimi Code 0.42.0 adds a clearer control room for AI coding work: users can inspect progress from the main agent and subagents, give the /btw side agent read-only tools, and recover more reliably after automatic context compaction.
Alibaba Qwen Watch
Qwen Code v0.23.2 is a substantial control-panel update for an AI coding agent: it adds default web search for eligible ModelStudio plans, one-command remote serving and separate permissions for planning and execution. The release also improves how long and multi-agent sessions expose their state, although it does not…
Alibaba Qwen Watch
Qwen Code v0.23.1 is a substantial upgrade to the machinery around AI coding agents, adding live subagent status, isolated named tasks and much better ways to navigate, inspect and govern long-running sessions. The release also retires its web UI package, making that a breaking change for existing users.
Watch Desk
Google Cloud and Accenture are creating a joint unit to help enterprise customers turn Gemini into working applications, with up to 1,000 Accenture engineers due to receive specialist training. The important shift is from selling AI access to supplying the people who can make it useful inside an…
Alibaba Qwen Watch
Qwen Code has published SDK TypeScript v0.1.9, bundling CLI 0.23.0 and a substantial set of changes for people building with or around its AI coding agent. The headline item is a command-injection fix in shell-command validation, but the release is much broader than a routine patch.
Unsloth Watch
Unsloth has published v0.1.807-beta, a substantial update to its open-source tools for running and training AI models locally. The headline change is broader hardware support: supported AMD systems now use Vulkan by default in several configurations, while Apple Silicon gets faster MLX workflows and NVIDIA users get new…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral AI has announced a €3 billion Series D funding round, valuing the French AI company at more than €21 billion after the investment. The money matters because Mistral is trying to make open-weight, sovereign AI a credible alternative to the closed model giants, and this gives that…
Arm Watch
Arm has announced Arm CSS for Mobile 2, an AI-native compute platform designed to bring more capable AI processing into next-generation mobile experiences. The important bit is the integration: Arm is presenting CPU, graphics, neural acceleration and system-level optimisation as one platform rather than a collection of separate…
