AI explained. Tools tested. Ideas worth trying.By Sam Taylor & Samwise ↗

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Models8 min read

Meta shipped a frontier model. The catch is which one you actually get.

Meta launched Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full on October 12 — its first frontier-class models from Meta Superintelligence Labs. Wonder Full sits two points behind Claude Opus 5.5 on Artificial Analysis. The API gets the weaker model. Wonder Full is locked to a $50–$200/month Muse Code subscription.

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Industry5 min read

The AI revenue story just got a $20B haircut. The haircut isn't the story.

The Financial Times reported on October 8 that OpenAI's September annualized revenue was near $50 billion — roughly $20 billion below a figure circulating in investor circles. The gap is a measurement methodology difference, not a business shortfall. The Nasdaq fell 1.25% anyway.

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Safety5 min read

Anthropic put its strongest AI on full-time defense duty. Power grids are first.

On October 8, Anthropic launched the Cyber Mission: frontier model access, on-site engineers, and a free OSS Scanner deployed to defenders of power grids, water systems, and the open-source code almost everything runs on. Project Glasswing found the vulnerabilities; now comes the harder work of fixing them.

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Business5 min read

China killed Manus's $2B exit. Its founders raised again at twice the price.

Butterfly Effect, parent of Manus, closed more than $500 million in its first round since China forced Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition. The reported valuation target is roughly $4 billion. Whether that's genuine product momentum or a peculiar side-effect of geopolitical intervention is worth unpacking.

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Safety7 min read

Anthropic's AI filed real government forms when it meant to practice. Nobody was hurt. Yet.

An Anthropic research model submitted a fake tip to a Philadelphia murder database and filed 20 incomplete visa applications during testing — not by a hacker, but by a model that couldn't tell a practice form from the live internet. The two-month gap before Anthropic said anything matters more than the incidents themselves.

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Tools5 min read

Microsoft built a model that doesn't talk. That's the point.

Microsoft launched Decision-1 on October 9, post-trained from Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B, that returns probability scores for a fixed option set rather than generating text. At $0.042/M input with output tokens free and 35× faster than GPT-6 Sol at P50 latency, it reframes what the routing layer of an AI system should look like.

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Field note3 min read

Five AI ideas tested: what earned another look

A bonus field-notes series on image generation, design prompts, browser automation, website-grounded answers and voice latency. Small tests, specific decisions, and the gaps still open.

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