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
AMD’s ROCm 10.1 release adds faster storage-to-GPU data paths, NUMA-aware host memory and a broader set of tools for deploying and profiling AI workloads. For teams running models on AMD GPUs, the changes target the unglamorous work of getting data to the hardware and understanding where a workload…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
The UK AI Security Institute has released Transect, an open-source tool for exploring long AI-agent evaluation transcripts. It turns a sprawling run into an interactive timeline, helping reviewers connect an agent’s activity, tool use and delegation to the evidence behind the analysis.
Watch Desk
ASUS has announced ProArt laptops powered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark platform, aimed at running AI models and creative workflows locally. The P16 and P14 are listed for US pre-orders from $2,599.99, with the first units due on 16 October; the announcement also outlines a compact desktop system for…
Watch Desk
As AI coding agents speed up software development, engineering leaders are rethinking team structures, safety practices and what skills developers need. At QCon London 2026, Hannah Foxwell argued that when code gets cheaper to produce, choosing worthwhile work and keeping people and systems safe become harder parts of…
DeepSeek Watch
DeepSeek has published two new open-source repositories targeting Huawei’s Ascend accelerators, for matrix multiplication and mixture-of-experts communication. Their familiar API shapes could make experimenting beyond Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem less of a rewrite, although the supported hardware is limited.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft is adding local AI models and sandboxed tool execution to GitHub Copilot on Windows. The change could let coding work move between a model running on a user’s PC and cloud models, while containing some agent-run commands in operating-system-level sandboxes.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says its FORGE Lab used AI-assisted research to find 140 Windows vulnerabilities between May and September 2026, including 52 addressed in September’s security release. The company’s account also describes a growing open-source vulnerability programme, where the work of validating and fixing findings may be harder to scale…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft Research Asia has released Agent Lightning v1.0, an open-source framework for training AI agents with reinforcement learning while keeping the agent harness used in deployment in the loop. Its coding-agent example reports a 14.6 percentage-point improvement on SWE-bench Verified, with about 6,000 training samples.
Watch Desk
Liquid AI has released two open d1 decision models, including one it says can answer a question in under 50 milliseconds on each of four tested NVIDIA devices. The models return structured decisions in a single pass rather than generating text, offering developers a smaller, faster option for…
Nous/Hermes Watch
Nous Research says it has raised a Series B to take Hermes Agent into new areas, including a planned mobile app. The funding could widen the reach of an open-source AI agent that has so far been known chiefly as software for computers and developers.
Watch Desk
Torch Systems has raised $11.5 million to expand its AI-powered monitoring of outdoor infrastructure, from solar sites to transmission corridors. Its solar-powered TerraNode devices combine cameras and environmental sensors with on-device AI to flag changes such as fires, overheating equipment and intrusions.
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral has unveiled ML4, an open-weight model the French company says can match leading closed systems on several business tasks. If that holds up, the attraction is not just another model score: organisations could adapt and run it on their own infrastructure.
AWS AI Watch
AWS’s AI business has passed a $25bn annual revenue run rate, while Amazon is spending heavily to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure. Yahoo Finance’s 7 October article also points to a sharp tension: the reported growth comes alongside a $7.6bn trailing-year free-cash-flow outflow, largely tied to higher…
Microsoft AI Watch
Alberta says it is using AI and modern software to update government services, while publishing 22 papers on how it is doing the work. The province’s partnership with Microsoft gives the project a practical question: can its methods make public services faster and cheaper without leaving other governments…
Meta AI Watch
Meta has brought its Muse AI assistant to iPad and added connectors for work and everyday apps, including Asana, Canva, Dropbox, GitHub and Notion. The expansion gives Muse a larger screen and a broader set of services to work with, while Meta’s new business features put the agent’s…
Watch Desk
Stacklok is building Mecatl, an open-source harness designed to run AI coding agents as cloud-managed infrastructure rather than as tightly coupled desktop tools. The pitch is aimed at organisations that want to govern agent sessions, execution and access centrally, instead of leaving them scattered across developers’ machines.
NVIDIA Watch
Nvidia considered a bid for AI model marketplace OpenRouter this summer, but did not make a formal offer before Stripe won the company with an $8 billion bid, The Information reports. The episode offers a glimpse of Nvidia’s widening dealmaking ambitions beyond chips.
AMD Watch
AMD is pitching its upcoming Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495, known as Gorgon Halo, as a way to run larger AI models locally by giving the system up to 192GB of shared memory. The most eye-catching benchmark claims are workload-dependent, but the memory capacity points to a real…
AMD Watch
AMD plans to open an AI research centre in South Korea by the end of this year and hire several hundred researchers. The centre would make Korea a base for global AI research and bring AMD chips together with locally developed AI processors.
Watch Desk
System76’s COSMIC desktop project now bars contributors from submitting AI-generated code, documentation, comments or descriptions, while a GNOME developer argues the project should accept AI-generated bug reports. The split puts a practical question to open-source teams: where should AI assistance stop, and where might it help developers find…
