OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki stated that the unreleased Astra model aims to be an "Automated AI Research Intern" by September 2026, while CEO Sam Altman estimates the company will declare AGI achieved internally by December 2026.
- Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face launched Microduck, a $399 open-source biped robot with 15 actuators and a rich sensor stack, shipping before Christmas.
- Zhipu's GLM-5.3-Flash (Ox Alpha) features 320B total parameters with 18B active, supporting 1M context and hybrid attention for coding and agentic tasks.
- Google released Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash for video generation, offering scene extension to 40s and frame control, ranking #1 in Text-to-Video Arena.
- OpenAI led a cyber defense coalition signed by 116 organizations, including Anthropic and Google, to counter AI-enabled attacks.
The Microduck launch enables community-scale physical AI through open simulation and reinforcement learning, while GLM-5.3-Flash offers high efficiency for local deployment.