Humanoid Robots 2026: Figure at BMW, Agility SPAC and China Race
Humanoid robots in 2026: Figure 03 at BMW, Agility’s $2.5B SPAC deal, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas plan and the China race, with what is verified and what is claimed.
Artificial Intelligence
AI news from The Boston Report: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and new AI tools, plus the safety, policy and business questions around artificial intelligence.
Mistral Large 4 Preview Brings 1 Trillion Open-Weight Model
Mistral Large 4 launched in preview Oct. 6, 2026: about 1 trillion parameters, multimodal, with open weights promised by the end of October.
Google SynthID Detector Opens to Everyone to Spot AI Media
Google’s SynthID Detector at synthid.com is open to all. See which files it scans, which AI firms it supports and what a clean result does not prove.
Google Bug Bounty Paused After Flood of AI Slop Reports
Google paused its open-source bug bounty on Oct. 1, citing a flood of invalid automated reports. What is affected and where researchers can still get paid.
ChatGPT Visual Ads Will Appear Beside AI-Generated Images
OpenAI will test labeled display ads beside ChatGPT image generation in the U.S. later this month, and adds measurement and brand-safety partners.
Modulate Raises $25M for Boston Voice Deepfake AI
Boston’s Modulate raised $25M led by Future Ventures to scale audio-native AI for deepfake detection and voice-agent monitoring. Funding totals and Velma.
Aleph Alpha Kolibri Open-Weight MoE Hits 78B With 1M Context
Aleph Alpha Kolibri-1 launches Oct. 3 as an Apache 2.0 German-English MoE with 78B parameters, 3.46B active, and context windows up to 1 million tokens.
FLUX 3 Image Brings Bounding-Box Layout and 4K Edits
FLUX 3 Image from Black Forest Labs launches Oct. 1 with bounding-box layouts, up to 10 refs, native 4K, and a unified generate/edit API deal through Oct. 8.
Ataraxos Stratego AI Beats Top Player 15-1-4 on Tiny Budget
Ataraxos Stratego AI from CMU, MIT, NYU and Stanford beat Pim Niemeijer 15-1-4, using a belief model for hidden pieces at roughly an $8k training cost.
David Robinson OpenAI Safety Lead Quits Over Broken Culture
David Robinson OpenAI Safety Systems leader resigns after 3.5 years, saying in an Atlantic essay that iterative-deployment culture is broken as AI risks grow.