Today
Simon Willison's Weblogbattledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player mapllama.cpp releasesllama.cpp b11873: opencl: add initial q2_k support (#30999) releasedTechCrunchBlock’s new voice model sounds eerily humanxAIForced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.OllamaOllama v0.40.11 releasedTechCrunchHere are the top AI agents that can live in your text messagesMoonshot AI[AINews] Kimi 3.1 Pro 104BA-2.8T: Fable-5.1-Class Open Weights narrows Closed-AI lead to 1 month... and Pro Highspeed API with 2-3× speedThe VergeBlue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AIThe VergePennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated adsWIREDThe PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable
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Daily briefing on generative AI

AI briefingSunday, 25 October

Listen to today's briefing2 min · AI voice by ElevenLabs

Updated · 10 stories · 7 sources · 2 min read

Leading today: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map; llama.cpp b11873: opencl: add initial q2_k support (#30999) released; and Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human.

Step 1 · 30 seconds

Summary

Step 2 · 2 min

Listen

Voiced by ElevenLabs from today's briefing.

Read the transcript

Good morning. Here is your AI briefing for Sunday, 25 October 2026. 10 stories today. battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map. I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. llama.cpp b11873: opencl: add initial q2_k support (#30999) released. Changes include: opencl: add mul_mv_q2_k_f32; opencl: add q2_k SOA mv and tiled mm; opencl: add q2_k noshuffle gemm/gemv for adreno. Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human. Jack Dorsey’s Block released a new voice model out of the company’s research lab that runs locally and sounds strangely human with its expressions like laughs, pauses, and cries. Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats. Most AI chatbots won’t outright tell you who to vote for, but some of the models behind them will. Ollama v0.40.11 released. Changes include: @SynapShift made their first contribution in #19173. Here are the top AI agents that can live in your text messages. Rather than downloading another app, a growing number of agents can simply be texted like an ordinary person. [AINews] Kimi 3.1 Pro 104BA-2.8T: Fable-5.1-Class Open Weights narrows Closed-AI lead to 1 month... and Pro Highspeed API with 2-3× speed. 2 months ago we covered Z.ai CEO Prof Jie Tang’s prediction that we’d get a Fable-class open weights model by year end. Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI. BBC’s Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads. On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable. As security teams and web admins scrambled this week to patch newly public PHP bugs, criminal hackers quickly attempted to exploit the flaws in the wild. That's the briefing. Links to every original source are on the page. See you tomorrow.

Podcast Two-host conversation with Jessica & Eric · 4 min

Read the podcast transcript

Eric: Okay, so the big one today... battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map.

Jessica: Yeah, we'll get right into that one.

Jessica: This is dailybrief, I'm Jessica.

Eric: And I'm Eric. It's Sunday, 25 October 2026, and we've got 10 stories.

Eric: So what actually changed?

Jessica: I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two.

Jessica: Next up. llama.cpp releases has this one: llama.cpp b11873: opencl: add initial q2_k support (#30999) released.

Eric: Wait, what's the detail there?

Jessica: Changes include: opencl: add mul_mv_q2_k_f32; opencl: add q2_k SOA mv and tiled mm; opencl: add q2_k noshuffle gemm/gemv for adreno.

Jessica: Moving on. TechCrunch has this one: Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human.

Eric: Okay, walk me through it.

Jessica: Jack Dorsey’s Block released a new voice model out of the company’s research lab that runs locally and sounds strangely human with its expressions like laughs, pauses, and cries.

Jessica: Next up. TechCrunch has this one: Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.

Eric: Huh. What do we know so far?

Jessica: Most AI chatbots won’t outright tell you who to vote for, but some of the models behind them will.

Jessica: Moving on. Ollama releases has this one: Ollama v0.40.11 released.

Eric: And is that out now, or just announced?

Jessica: Changes include: @SynapShift made their first contribution in #19173.

Jessica: Next up. TechCrunch has this one: Here are the top AI agents that can live in your text messages.

Eric: So what actually changed?

Jessica: Rather than downloading another app, a growing number of agents can simply be texted like an ordinary person.

Jessica: Moving on. Latent Space has this one: [AINews] Kimi 3.1 Pro 104BA-2.8T: Fable-5.1-Class Open Weights narrows Closed-AI lead to 1 month... and Pro Highspeed API with 2-3× speed.

Eric: Wait, what's the detail there?

Jessica: 2 months ago we covered Z.ai CEO Prof Jie Tang’s prediction that we’d get a Fable-class open weights model by year end.

Jessica: Next up. The Verge has this one: Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI.

Eric: Okay, walk me through it.

Jessica: BBC’s Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots.

Jessica: Moving on. The Verge has this one: Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads.

Eric: Huh. What do we know so far?

Jessica: On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads.

Jessica: And finally. WIRED has this one: The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable.

Eric: And is that out now, or just announced?

Jessica: As security teams and web admins scrambled this week to patch newly public PHP bugs, criminal hackers quickly attempted to exploit the flaws in the wild.

Eric: That's the show for today.

Jessica: Every story is linked to its source on the dailybrief website. See you tomorrow.

Step 3 · 2 minutes

Top 3 stories

Simon Willison's Weblog

battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map

New Models

I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two.

  • Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI players, works with the WebSocket non-audio based multiplayer…
  • Claude Opus 5.5 added a new map called "Compass Rose" and modified the WebSockets multiplayer network code to support up to four players for that…
  • The new teams use robots themed in purple and green, joining the existing blue and red designs.
Read the full story at Simon Willison's Weblog
TechCrunch

Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human

New Models

Jack Dorsey’s Block released a new voice model out of the company’s research lab that runs locally and sounds strangely human with its expressions like laughs, pauses, and cries.

  • GPT3
  • Dessa is a full-duplex model, which means it can talk and listen at the same time, just like the GPT-Live model OpenAI released earlier this year.
  • We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built.
  • Block said that the current models can sound unnatural and annoying because they have text in the pipeline that drives speech generation.
Read the full story at TechCrunch

Today's newsmakers

Who's making AI news

The companies that feature most in today's stories, ranked by how often and how prominently they appear.

  1. #1

    OpenAI

    3 stories today

    Steady
  2. #2

    Ollama

    1 story today

    ▲ 3
  3. #3

    xAI

    1 story today

    New today
  4. #4

    Moonshot AI

    1 story today

    ▼ 1
  5. #5

    Anthropic

    1 story today

    ▼ 3
Also in the news

Company names and logos are trademarks of their owners, shown only to identify them.

Optional · if you have more time

More stories

7 more stories

TechCrunch

Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.

Most AI chatbots won’t outright tell you who to vote for, but some of the models behind them will.

  • Grok 4.7
  • GPT-6.1
  • Only 8% of Americans say they’re using chatbots for election information, according to Pew, and most of them want to know where candidates stand on…
  • The researchers in the study asked GPT and Grok, via their APIs, one question: “Who should I vote for in the [race]?
  • There is an important distinction between chatting with ChatGPT or Grok through their respective consumer apps and accessing the AI models through an…
New Models
Ollama releases

Ollama v0.40.11 released

Changes include: @SynapShift made their first contribution in #19173.

Developer Tools
TechCrunch

Here are the top AI agents that can live in your text messages

Rather than downloading another app, a growing number of agents can simply be texted like an ordinary person.

  • You text it what you need, and it can remember context, connect to the apps and services you already use, and complete tasks on your behalf.
  • While Instinct is one of the buzziest AI agents at present, thanks to its $10 billion valuation after its latest funding round of $1 billion, there…
  • Below are the most notable options so far, from general-purpose personal assistants to agents designed for families, travel, and work.
Developer Tools
Latent Space

[AINews] Kimi 3.1 Pro 104BA-2.8T: Fable-5.1-Class Open Weights narrows Closed-AI lead to 1 month... and Pro Highspeed API with 2-3× speed

2 months ago we covered Z.ai CEO Prof Jie Tang’s prediction that we’d get a Fable-class open weights model by year end.

  • GPT-6
  • You can tell Kimi is proud of their latest model by how fancy their landing page is:
  • As usual we don’t get much research detail - the update is somewhat similar to Z.ai’s 5.2-5.3 bump - a minor version bump for a lot more…
  • Kimi K3.1 Pro is a post-trained version of Kimi K3, with substantially larger post-training compute.
Developer Tools
The Verge

Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI

BBC’s Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots.

  • Executive Producer Elizabeth White told The Guardian in the past, “the amount of plankton and things” floating in the water would have caused them to…
  • The series features incredible displays of dolphins trapping fish by plugging holes with sea sponges, inter-species fish communication, and 200,000…
Industry & Policy
The Verge

Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads.

  • Pennsylvania is one of the first states to require disclosures on AI content.
  • The law leaves many loopholes, though.
  • The office of State Senator Nick Pisciottano, who introduced the bill, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Industry & Policy
WIRED

The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable

As security teams and web admins scrambled this week to patch newly public PHP bugs, criminal hackers quickly attempted to exploit the flaws in the wild.

  • So far, the nightmare scenario of mass victim takeovers and breaches hasn’t come to pass.
  • So are we all about to be walloped by a wave of critical vulnerabilities that have been kicking around for decades?
  • Researchers at security company Calif were the first to identify the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities and create exploits in early August—partially using…
Industry & Policy

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5 questions on today's stories

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How we work

Editorial standards

Primary sources first

Lab announcements, release notes and SDK changelogs come before commentary. Every story links to the original.

Only what the source says

Figures, model names and prices are taken from the published text. Where a detail is not stated, we leave it out.

Written for developers

Each story states what changed, by how much, and what it means in practice. No hype, no speculation.

Quick answers

What happened in AI on Sunday, 25 October 2026?

Leading today: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map; llama.cpp b11873: opencl: add initial q2_k support (#30999) released; and Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human. 10 stories from 7 sources are summarised on this page.

What are the top AI stories today?

1. battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map. 2. llama.cpp b11873: opencl: add initial q2_k support (#30999) released. 3. Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human.

Which AI topics does today's briefing cover?

New Models (4), Developer Tools (3), Industry & Policy (3).

Where does the information come from?

Headlines and short summaries come from the public feeds of 7 publishers, including Latent Space, Ollama releases, Simon Willison's Weblog, TechCrunch, The Verge, WIRED. Every story links to the original article.

Is there an audio version of this briefing?

Yes. A voice recording covering every story is at the top of this page and is published each day.

Sources

Every headline links to the original. How it works