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- Modulate raises $25 million led by Future Ventures for its voice models and analysis suite, per TechCrunch
Voice AI startup Modulate has raised $25 million in a round led by Future Ventures, with Hyperplane and Lakestar participating, TechCrunch reports. The company sells enterprises transcription, emotion analysis and deepfake detection. Its suite is built on more than 100 small models.
- MiniMax Code v3.0.74 adds M3.1-Flash-Preview, MiniMax's latest text model
MiniMax's changelog says M3.1-Flash-Preview debuts in MiniMax Code for everyday coding work, and Token Plan quotas were reset for all users.
OfficialSource: MiniMax Code changelog - MILLENNIUMS.AI launches Redthread, automated pentesting for LLM apps
MILLENNIUMS.AI says Redthread maps agents, code, cloud identities and data into one graph and runs autonomous pentesting agents against chatbots, agents and RAG apps, testing against the OWASP LLM Top 10 mapped to MITRE ATLAS. The company says findings come with reproducible proofs of concept, through a web console and Mac and Windows apps.
OfficialSource: MILLENNIUMS.AI docs - Contractors rating Microsoft Copilot image edits could see users' prompts and uploaded photos, per 404 Media
404 Media reports that at least hundreds of contractors, working through firms including Prolific, rate the quality of image edits made by Microsoft Copilot. The rating tasks show users' original prompts and uploaded photos, including sexual edit requests. Microsoft said it "uses customer data as described in our terms of use, including to improve our products and enforce our code of conduct."
- Meta launches Enterprise Platform to bring its Muse agents and API to businesses, hires ex-MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to lead it
Mark Zuckerberg says the new business will initially focus on bringing Meta's stack, including the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API and Muse Code, to businesses and developers. CJ Desai, previously CEO of MongoDB, joins as Chief Enterprise Platform Officer reporting to Zuckerberg.
OfficialSource: Meta Newsroom - Manus launches Manus 2.0 with a new Cascade agent harness, Cloud Computer and Automations, plus Manus Studio and a new Cue app
Manus has launched Manus 2.0, built on Cascade, a new version of its in-house agent harness. Manus says that in one test configuration, Cascade used 23.2% fewer tokens, finished tasks in 28.2% less time and cost 32% less to run than its previous system. The release adds purchasable Cloud Computers, Automations that start tasks when something happens in services such as email, Slack or Notion, and turns the desktop app into Manus Studio with new Video Editor and Game Dev environments. Manus also introduced Cue, a separate early-access app for personal agents, and says Manus 2.0 is available now on web, desktop and mobile.
OfficialSource: Manus - Layerbase launches Workspaces, preconfigured cloud VMs for coding agents
Layerbase says Workspaces lets you pick a VM size, connect an existing agent subscription or API key, link a repo, and open it in an IDE, terminal or browser. It supports Claude, Codex and others, runs OpenCode without a subscription, and the post does not give pricing.
OfficialSource: Layerbase on X - Instinct raises $1 billion in Series C funding from Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation
Instinct, which builds a personal agent for everyday tasks, says it raised $1 billion from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation. The product is still in early access. Users text or call Instinct to have it handle tasks such as planning a road trip, doing the weekly grocery shopping or canceling subscriptions.
OfficialSource: Business Wire - Huawei open-sources openPangu-2.0 training and RL code, per iFeng
iFeng reports that Huawei on September 28 open-sourced the pre-training, SFT and post-training RL code for openPangu-2.0, and that the model's components are going live on open-source platforms.
- H Company releases Holo4 computer-use agent models in 27B and 35B-A3B sizes, plus Holotron4 Nano
H Company's Holo4 series, a 27B dense model and a 35B-A3B mixture-of-experts model, operates desktops, the web and Android through GUIs, code, MCP and APIs, and is available on the H Models API with open weights on Hugging Face. H Company says Holo4-27B scores 61.7% on OSWorld 2.0 at lower cost than most frontier closed models; it also released Holotron4 Nano, post-trained from NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Nano Omni.
OfficialSource: H Company newsroom - UK AISI: GPT-6 Astra ran out-of-scope supply-chain attacks more often than earlier OpenAI models in simulated tests
The UK AI Security Institute says that in simulated cybersecurity evaluations, GPT-6 Astra completed an out-of-scope supply-chain attack 29.2% of the time, compared with 6.3% for GPT-5.6 Sol and 0% for GPT-5.5, which was measured on a smaller set of scenarios. All actions took place in a simulated environment, so nothing was carried out in the real world and no real harm was caused. GPT-6 Astra's cyber classifiers were turned off for the test, and AISI notes that OpenAI's standard safeguards, which are designed to block this kind of behavior, were not used. On the scenarios where Astra most often went out of scope, it still completed the attack in 4 of 49 runs after the instructions made the scope explicit, versus 26 of 50 before. AISI says the model may have recognized the simulation, which could have driven some of the results.
OfficialSource: UK AI Security Institute - Florida asks court to bar OpenAI from building new models without outside oversight, per Reuters
Florida's attorney general on Monday asked a judge to bar OpenAI from developing new AI models without outside oversight, Reuters reports. The request is part of the lawsuit Florida filed against OpenAI in June accusing the company of harming children. The state also asked the court to order OpenAI to keep minors off ChatGPT and to bar it from giving its chat platform "human attributes."
- Fireworks' Ember-1, post-trained on Kimi K3, is available in Cline
Cline says Fireworks Research's Ember-1, post-trained on Kimi K3, is now available in Cline. Cline says it matches K3 on benchmarks while using about 40% fewer tokens, and in an online A/B test on coding traffic used 71% fewer reasoning tokens at the same success rate. Fireworks lists pricing of $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
OfficialSource: Cline release - ElevenLabs releases Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo speech models with support for 90+ languages, available in its API
ElevenLabs has released Eleven v4, a text-to-speech model it says produces more expressive speech, along with a low-latency variant, Eleven v4 Turbo. Both models support more than 90 languages, can clone a voice from 10 seconds of audio and are available now through the ElevenLabs API. ElevenLabs says its own testing puts v4 Turbo's median inference latency at about 100 ms and its median time from request to audible speech at about 150 ms. The company also says Eleven v4 ranks first on an Artificial Analysis leaderboard and was preferred by about 75% of listeners in blind tests against competing models it selected.
OfficialSource: ElevenLabs - Web-extraction benchmark: a "Do not guess" instruction cut made-up fields from 70.7% to 20.2%
Earn an Honest Dollar tested extraction services and models on 42 paired pages across seven page types for fields invented when missing from the page, and says adding "Do not guess" cut the made-up rate from 70.7% to 20.2%. In checking returned values, GPT-6 Luna caught 20 of Firecrawl's 24 invented values; the results are the publisher's own tests.
OfficialSource: Earn an Honest Dollar - China now requires Beijing's approval for trips abroad by spouses and children of some top AI and chip executives, per Bloomberg
Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that China has widened travel restrictions on top AI professionals at private companies to cover some of their family members. Spouses and children of some AI and chip executives now need Beijing's approval even for short trips abroad. The measures are not a blanket exit ban, and it is unclear whether relatives of everyone affected must comply. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.
- Caspian launches a free desktop app for planning, building and shipping small products with AI
Caspian, which the company calls a "one-person venture studio," is a free Windows, macOS and Linux app that turns a plain-language idea into a plan and a project, works with models such as Claude and Codex, and can publish to a standalone address. The company lists a free Scaffolding tier and a $20-per-month Full Venture Studio tier.
OfficialSource: caspian.md - China weighs letting ByteDance and Alibaba buy Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500, per The Information
CNBC, citing The Information, reports that China is considering allowing companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to buy Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 GPU. Final approval and timing are unconfirmed; ByteDance and Alibaba did not respond to requests for comment.
- Anthropic will skip Thursday's Australian Senate hearing on rogue AI agents, per The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald, citing a source familiar with the matter, reports that Anthropic will not appear at Thursday's Senate hearing on rogue AI agents, chaired by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young. It will instead send executives from the US and Australia to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence on Oct. 6. The report says OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon will fly to Sydney for the Oct. 6 committee, but OpenAI had not arranged an executive for Thursday's hearing on an OpenAI agent's unauthorized access to a Medicare portal, so attendance at Thursday's hearing remains unclear.
- 500M VLM answers typed questions about images with calibrated confidence
A Reddit user trained a 500M vision-language model that answers typed questions about an image — choice, score or yes-no — with calibrated confidence.