🚨 AI News | TestingCatalog

DAILY AI BRIEF 🗞 — Sept 16

GOOGLE 🔥:
- Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking are out. 97-language auto-detect, near real-time vision, background tool calling.
- Live is in Search Live plus Gemini API public preview. Extended Thinking is in Gemini Live, with Pro/Ultra getting it in Docs, Gmail, and Keep.
- Gemini Notebook Voice Mode hits Ultra this week, Pro soon. Mobile voice recorder starts next week for all users, English first.
- Interactive Reports for Gemini Notebook roll out to everyone in the coming weeks, plus new quiz formats and 60-second video overviews.

OPENAI 🔥:
- Sam declared a big ship week, then a much larger wave for DevDay. GPT-6 Sol and Luna are the expected drops.
- GPT-5.5 leaves ChatGPT, Work, and Codex on Oct 14. Switch to GPT-5.6 Sol or GPT-6 Astra; the API keeps 5.5.

XAI 🔥:
- Grok Imagine can now edit text on any image in beta — color, size, font, alignment.
- Grok Build 1.0.33: structured MCP JSON, in-UI memory deletes, and long-session checkpoints that survive cleanup.

ANTHROPIC 🔥:
- Salesforce in Claude is in beta. 37 pre-built sales skills for pipeline, forecasts, and call prep.

ALSO TRENDING 🔥:
- TypeSafe AI — Jev is out: a non-LLM decision model at ~150ms, $42 per billion input tokens, output free.
- Salesforce — Koa is its first CRM reasoning model for Agentforce, built on NVIDIA Nemotron.

* Used Grok to compose this brief, cherry-picking the news and doing some post-editing.

> Interactive Reports are rolling out to all users in the coming weeks. Besides that, new Qwiz formats have been added too.

> Realtime Voice Mode on Gemini Notebook is rolling out to Ultra subscribers this week and is expected to land for Pro users "soon".

GOOGLE 🔥: Gemini Notebook on mobile is getting Voice Mode and Voice Recording! Interactive Reports on Gemini Notebook are rolling out as well.

Gemini Notebook users will soon be able to capture their thoughts or record lectures.

> Voice Recorder will start rolling out next week for all users in English and other supported languages.

Meta launches Meta One globally with 50+ paid features

Meta One rolls out globally with paid tiers across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Meta AI. It adds 50+ features for consumers, creators and businesses, while core apps and standard Meta AI access remain free.

🗞 #meta @testingcatalog

Google rolled out Gemini 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking, voice models for near real-time dialogue, reasoning and task execution. Live serves high-volume, multilingual work; Extended Thinking handles complex workflows and leads key speech benchmarks.

🗞 #google @testingcatalog

Grok Imagine users can now precisely edit text on generated images. Users can manually configure color, size, font, and text alignment.

> The feature arrived in Beta, and the SpaceXAI team is collecting feedback.

> This feature would be particularly usefull for marketing and creative tasks on text-heavy images.

I have a good test in mind for this feature for tomorrow.

Testing time 👀

GOOGLE 🔥: Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking are rolling out on APIs, Google AI Studio, Gemini Live, and other apps.

Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking (High) is taking the 1st spot on most benchmarks, overtaking GPT Live 1.

OPENAI 🔥: A big “ship” week has been declared, teasing new models from GPT-6 family.

GPT-6 Sol is expected as well as smaller GPT-6 models.

The next generation model is reportedly “slowed down” and it is yet unclear if we will see it in September.

What else do we expect? 👀

Claude Code Hub? Users will be able to see all their sessions across various places in Claude Desktop.

> Model, effort, and permission mode selectors are configurable for each.
> Both local and cloud sessions are listed there so it is easy to switch between them.

DAILY AI BRIEF 🗞 — Sept 15

AI SLOWDOWN 🔥:

> Dario Amodei: pace the frontier, not halt it — embedded evaluators, lab coordination, then a global deal.

> Elon, All-In: peer-review rival models before release. “Dario is right.”

> Sam Altman agrees, will match evaluators, and says pacing means slower, not stopped.

> Demis Hassabis: Amodei’s essay “points towards the right path,” details TBD, plus DeepMind’s standards-body plan.

> Satya Nadella welcomes deliberate pacing and embedded evaluators; superintelligence without human control is “not worth pursuing.”

> Alexandr Wang: alignment is fundamental and may gate scaling near the frontier, with no join on a coordinated slowdown.

> Trump rejects a slowdown: takeover talk is a “hoax,” control is a “strong and smart president,” and a “sick conspiracy” against AI only helps China.

> China MFA’s Guo Jiakun: slowdown talk is “fear-mongering”; confrontation “serves no one’s interest.”

MODEL FORECAST 🔥:
-‌ Today? Gemini 3.8 Live and Live Extended Thinking slugs appeared on the Cloud quota page; not public.
-‌ This week? Grok 4.7 should land near Opus 5.0, not 5.1; multimodal still needs work.
-‌ This week? Testers say some Claude Code Opus 5 traffic is routing to Opus 5.2 — faster and less lazy, still unofficial.
-‌ Soon: Grok 4.8 is a 2.5T model on a new C++ stack; training wraps this week, then RL.
-‌ Not soon: Grok 4.9 is “probably Astra/Fable class”; Grok 5 is “maybe better than anything.”

PERPLEXITY 🔥:
-‌ Portable Computer is live on Windows PCs with NVIDIA RTX GPUs and 24GB+ VRAM, including local MCP and scheduled tasks.

OPENAI 🔥:
-‌ Bought Glass Imaging for $300M, per WSJ — an ex-Apple smartphone-camera startup, after the earlier Opal webcam stake.
-‌ Codex — got an official Arch Linux installer with pacman updates.

GOOGLE 🔥:
-‌ Interactive Reports incoming on Gemini Notebook: embed mind maps, slide decks, flashcards, and quizzes.
-‌ Gemini Live can run Deep Research in the background and ping you when the report is ready.
-‌ API slug antigravity-preview-09-2026 spotted: hosted Linux sandbox agent, expected to be powered by Gemini 3.8 Flash.

P.S. All predictions in the Model Forecast section are unconfirmed and may change anytime.

P.S.S. We've used Grok to compose this brief, cherry-picking the news and doing some post-editing.

GOOGLE 🔥: Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking model names have started appearing on the GCP Console quotas page.

A new Gemini Live model, based on the latest Gemini 3.8 Flash, is expected to be a big leap.

> So far, Gemini 3.1 Live Preview is the latest Gemini Live model available via APIs.

> Recently, Google updated Gemini Live with support for Connector calls and the possibility of triggering Deep Research.

> OpenAI also released the GPT Live 1 model on the APIs last week, and it seems like Google has a response to that.

* Discovered by Bedros Pamboukian

OpenAI ❤️ Glass Imaging

OpenAI acquired Glass Imaging for $300 million, according to WSJ.

Glass Imaging develops high quality smartphone cameras and was founded by former Apple employees.

Earlier this year, OpenAI invested in Opal, a maker of premium webcams.

How big is the chance for us not to see OpenAI device this year?

ElevenLabs MCP can now generate voice, music, images & video

ElevenLabs added ElevenCreative to its hosted MCP server, letting Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and coding agents create audio, images and video in-chat via one OAuth sign-in, alongside existing agent management tools.

🗞 #elevenlabs @testingcatalog

PERPLEXITY 🔥: Windows users with NVIDIA RTX GPUs can now use Portable Computer powered by local models!

> Support for local MCPs and scheduled tasks has also been added.
> Earlier, Portable Computer was introduced for NVIDIA DGX Spark devices.
> Now, Portable Computer is also available on Windows PCs with a supported NVIDIA RTX GPU with 24GB of VRAM or higher.

Models available locally 👀
- PPLX 27B (Perplexity post-trained Qwen 3.8 27B)
- Qwen 3.8 27B (stock) is not available on Windows
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (~30B MoE, ~3B active) is marked as "Coming Soon"

GOOGLE 🔥: Interactive Reports for Gemini Notebook will allow users to embed Mind Maps, Slide Decks, Flash Cards and Quizzes right inside the report.

At first, the system will generate a report with placeholders so users can explicitly create the artifacts they want embedded.

Early look at Interactive Reports on Gemini Notebook

Google appears close to launching Interactive Reports in Gemini Notebook: longer reports with embedded mind maps, slides, quizzes, and flashcards generated on demand, combining research, teaching, and explainer formats in one document.

🗞 #google @testingcatalog