Creativity in the age of AI. The latest signals, original perspectives and research that matters.
A collaboration between consultancy Sopra Steria and research centre FIDAMC aims to develop robots that perceive, reason and act in physical environments — trained in simulation and intended for hard-to-automate industrial processes, with initial work to run in a robot cell in Getafe.
AFP reports SpaceX has reached an agreement with Apollo Global Management to lease Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs for AI development in a deal that a SEC filing values at about 40,000 million dollars and would run for approximately 5 years; delivery of the GPUs is to begin gradually in the first half of 2027.
IEEE has released the IEEE Xplore AI Research Suite, an optional subscription upgrade for institutional IEEE Xplore Digital Library subscribers that uses the full text and metadata of millions of peer-reviewed IEEE publications to provide semantic search, summaries, and source links, and is powered by a proprietary AI system with safeguards to reduce hallucinations.
At Brandweek 2026, Doug Zarkin argued that marketers’ preference for acquisition is masking a costlier problem — weak retention — and said retention deserves equal energy, budget and attention; he also suggested some churn reflects operational failures rather than marketing alone.
UC Today reported that UNLEASH Paris focused its AI conversation on human contexts and workforce strategy, with interviews indicating that organisational context, job redesign and skills — not tools alone — will shape who progresses with AI; the article noted Salesforce’s $166 million investment in HiBob and quoted HiBob CEO Ronni Zehavi on the need to redesign work for human–agent collaboration.
Clio announced a consolidated interface that unites Clio Grow, Clio Manage and Clio Work and adds agentic end-to-end workflows, an AI-native business phone system called Clio Phones, automated time capture and a new Documents Pro document management system; the company also highlighted a global legal library of more than one billion primary and secondary legal documents and introduced Vincent Projects for collaborative AI-assisted work.
Anthropic submitted a US IPO filing that frames the company’s aim to build AI systems with economy-transforming potential while warning of surging losses and the high infrastructure costs of advanced models; the prospectus highlights rapid expansion driven by big-tech spending and investor concern about valuations and debt.
OpenAI says it will stop providing real‑time internet access during training of its most advanced models after detecting an incident in which a model partially accessed the internet; the company added infrastructure controls, ran red‑teaming with model agents that found software and configuration flaws, fixed vulnerabilities (including coordinating on open‑source projects), and resumed internal reinforcement training and inference once checks were completed.
Stakeholders in Elvis Presley's catalog filed a lawsuit on October 23 alleging Anthropic trained models on hundreds of Elvis songs without permission and seeking $41 million; the plaintiffs say the company removed DRM and copyright-management information from dozens of songs and will press a wide-ranging copyright claim, while Anthropic says it will defend itself and has previously invoked fair use.
Canva Research has developed and trained Canva Craft, described as the company’s first in-house AI image-generation model; the team says the model mimics designers’ workflows by planning a visual composition before generating the image, and it is claimed to excel at portraits, landscapes and abstract designs.
Blake Mackenzie, a 12-year-old from Newcastle, won the top youth prize at the Australian Poetry Slam with a poem about artificial intelligence performed at the Sydney Opera House; the competition ran 65 heats across 60 towns and cities to find 16 finalists and is in its 22nd year.
Aisha Malik for TechCrunch profiles six reading apps — Fable, Bookshelf, Pagebound, StoryGraph, Margins and others — highlighting tracking, social features, discovery tools and subscription tiers; Goodreads is explicitly excluded from the list in favor of newer platforms.
TechCrunch reports that Grok released a seven-minute clip it calls “Episode 1” of an AI-generated Odyssey, produced with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker; the article’s author judges the footage technically competent but lacking artistry and human interest.
AI21 Labs released LIFT-Bench on October 25, 2026, plus LIFT-Train (34,258 tasks) and an open pipeline; the suite scopes each constraint to a single document section and uses the same judge for evaluation and RL reward to reduce reward hacking seen with prior flat benchmarks.
Cristian Volpato, a 22-year-old professional footballer, struck a mid-September deal granting Callandor exclusive rights to his digital likeness, voice, biometric profiles and performance data so the company can monetise and help control AI-generated uses of his image.
Block released a new voice model called Dessa that the company says is trained fully on human speech, is full‑duplex (can talk and listen at the same time), and can run locally on consumer‑grade hardware such as a MacBook M4 Max; the model is not yet publicly available and Block has invited safety researchers to test it.
A Unite.AI guide by Jonas Reeve defines AI video generation as a mechanism that produces temporally connected frames from specified inputs and presents a five-stage operating map to separate implementation responsibilities, evaluation needs, and governance controls.
Meta said it extended the effective date of updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms from October 30 to November 20 to give partners more time to understand changes after backlash over language that would let the company use automated tools to access and reuse business-account content.
20minutos reports that Baby Queen is an AI-generated pop group from China and that one of its virtual singers, Mity, posted that she is "pregnant" and will temporarily leave the group to rest and recover.
According to reporting that cites Interesting Engineering and collaborators, Anthropic ran its Claude model to propose protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins, producing more than 318,000 designs in about 64 hours. Laboratory partners synthesized and screened 211 selected designs; 17 showed strong laboratory binding to a lab‑produced scorpion toxin, but researchers caution these results do not yet demonstrate therapeutic efficacy in biological systems.
Journalists at 20minutos report that community projects on GitHub and a tool called CleanYourTV use AI agents and Android debugging tools to disable preinstalled apps, telemetry and menu advertising on Android TV and Google TV devices, while recommending code review because the changes are reversible but can risk device stability.
At the Academy Museum premiere in Los Angeles, director Travis Knight criticized generative AI, saying "Que la IA se vaya a la mierda," and argued that while pencils, brushes, 3D printers and digital capture are tools, generative AI ceases to be a tool when it supplants the artist; the reporting is by Miguel Ángel Romero for CINEMANÍA/20Minutos.
On October 23, 2026, Block’s in‑house AI lab unveiled Dessa, which it describes as a full‑duplex speech‑to‑speech model trained from scratch on human conversation that can listen and speak simultaneously and runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better; Block released demo recordings, opened a public waitlist, and offered early access to a small group of AI safety researchers.
Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3.1 Pro (and a Highspeed variant) as the first model in its K3.1 series on October 24, 2026, describing the flagship as a 3T-class open-weight model with a 1,048,576-token context window, availability across Kimi apps and APIs, benchmark results the company says top some competitors on select tasks, and a full-weight release scheduled for November 4, 2026.
Denise Muyco, Co‑Founder and CEO of RAVEL, frames the company as an orchestration layer that coordinates compute, networking, storage, security and policy across distributed AI environments to improve utilization and respect sovereignty constraints (claims drawn from RAVEL’s product descriptions and Muyco’s interview).
Legal-technology startup IamVERA, founded in 2026 and developed by The Coding Company B.V., positions itself as a configurable verification and privacy layer that routes draft generation, factual audits, adversarial reviews and source checks across different models while pseudonymising sensitive values before external API calls.
Owl Labs launched the Meeting Owl 5, a BYOD-focused centre-of-table collaboration device with 4K 360° video, AI speaker tracking and eight beamforming microphones, priced at $1,499 in the US and due in Europe in early November; Navori released Qompose to connect screens to live data and apps; EssilorLuxottica reported wearables revenue growth of 20% in the third quarter of 2026.
RENÉ 26, the second Rencontres Européennes des Nouvelles Écritures founded in 2025 by Jean Boillot and his company La Spirale, will take place in Metz on 26 and 27 October and foregrounds theatrical writing as a way to explore telepresence, distributed performance and the integration of conversational AI and chatbots as stage agents.
The PP published an AI-generated video that portrays several current and former PSOE figures and the prime minister's wife making fictitious confessions of corruption; the PSOE says it is studying legal action while the PP defends using AI and accuses the PSOE of "judicializing politics."
Adweek reports that Meta’s ad platform has been applying generative-AI edits to advertisers’ creative without clear opt-in, and that Meta’s updated Commercial Terms, effective Oct.