Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Mistral Previews Large 4, a Trillion-Parameter Model Bound for Open Weights
Paris-based Mistral launched a public preview of Mistral Large 4, a one-trillion-parameter multimodal model code-named “Le Chonk” with 49 billion active parameters. The company said it trained the model from scratch over roughly two months on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in its own European data centers, across more than 160 languages. Mistral plans to publish the weights on Oct. 27 after about three weeks of testing with developers, cybersecurity leaders and government authorities. Preliminary results supplied by Mistral show 62% on the DeepSWE v1.1 coding benchmark. VentureBeat noted the live DeepSWE leaderboard ranks several other models higher.
Sources: VentureBeat
Boston Dynamics Names Former Amazon Alexa Executive Rohit Prasad as CEO
Boston Dynamics named Rohit Prasad as its chief executive, effective October 7, nearly nine months after former CEO Robert Playter stepped down. Prasad takes over from Chief Financial Officer Amanda McMaster, who had served as interim CEO since February. He previously served as senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence at Amazon, where he also led development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family. The company said the appointment accelerates its physical AI strategy. Prasad is expected to join the board, subject to approval, and becomes only the third CEO in the company’s history.
Sources: The Robot Report
Nvidia-Backed Lambda Raising Up to $4 Billion Ahead of Planned 2027 IPO
Cloud provider Lambda is raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money valuation in what could be its last private round before a planned 2027 IPO, TechCrunch reported, citing The Wall Street Journal. Coatue Management and Blackstone are leading the round. A letter to investors shows Lambda’s backlog grew from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September, much of it apparently driven by a $35 billion commitment from Anthropic signed in late August. Lambda raised an additional $1 billion in debt last week. Lambda, Coatue and Blackstone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Sources: TechCrunch
Anthropic Puts Claude Inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides
Anthropic released a first-party integration that places Claude in a sidebar inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, available in public beta across all paid Claude plans, including Enterprise. Users can also open and edit those files from the Claude web interface. In Sheets, Claude can write formulas, build pivot tables and native charts, and pull ranges into Python for data cleaning. In Slides, it generates slides using a deck’s existing layouts and themes. Claude defaults to an “Ask before edits” setting, with an “Accept all edits” option. Administrators can deploy the add-on across a Workspace domain or selected groups.
Sources: VentureBeat
TwelveLabs Releases Pegasus 1.6 to Turn First-Person Video Into Robot Training Data
Video AI company TwelveLabs released Pegasus 1.6, adding specialized support for egocentric footage recorded from the perspective of the person or machine performing a task. The company is targeting robotics developers and data suppliers that need to convert such recordings into labeled, timestamped training material. TwelveLabs says earlier versions handled first-person video poorly. The release also adds native image analysis. Published pricing is $1.75 per hour of input video and $7.50 per million output tokens. VentureBeat noted the company supplied no numerical scores or competitor comparisons, and no robotics customer with independently checkable results.
Sources: VentureBeat
Benchmark Leads $25 Million Seed Round in Missile Interceptor Startup Furientis
Benchmark is leading a $25 million seed round into Furientis, its first bet on a pure defense startup. The one-year-old company aims to mass-produce interceptor missiles and has already secured a funded Pentagon contract to build mid-range interceptors. A person familiar with the company put its valuation at $125 million. Furientis designs systems that can be assembled quickly from readily available components, at a fraction of the cost of legacy interceptors. It tests missiles in the field on a bi-weekly basis and aims eventually to manufacture 1,000 systems a year in each factory. It currently works from Los Angeles.
Sources: TechCrunch
Anti-Bot Defenses Are Blocking Personal AI Agents as Industry Drafts a Standard
Personal AI agents such as Meta’s Muse are running into blocks on retail and travel sites, some deliberate and others caused by traditional anti-bot measures, TechCrunch reported. Walmart, a Muse partner, said those failures were not intentional; TechCrunch said many appear tied to buttons that verify visitors are human. Delta said any opening to agents would need “security and the customer experience in mind.” Yelp said it does not permit non-human traffic unless agents pay for data access. Meta, Walmart, Stripe, Sierra, Genesys, Rocket, NiCE and Decagon have begun work on an open standard for agent-to-agent commerce communication to separate legitimate agents from malicious bots.
Sources: TechCrunch
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models: Claude Opus 5 (96% SWE-B V) | Claude Mythos 5 (95.5% SWE-B V) | Claude Fable 5 (95% SWE-B V)
Top Open Source Models: Ornith-1.5-397B (86% SWE-B V) | Ornith-1.0-397B (82.4% SWE-B V) | DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (80.6% SWE-B V)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B (79% SWE-B V) | Qwen3.6-27B (77.2% SWE-B V) | Muse Glimmer 30B (76% SWE-B V)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Ornith-1.5-9B (70.6% SWE-B V) | Ornith-1.0-9B (69.4% SWE-B V) | Granite 4.2 8B (47.7% SWE-B V)
AI Leaders: NVIDIA $5.82T | Alphabet $4.17T | Microsoft $3.78T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical $143.0B | Fanuc $36.4B | Symbotic $25.9B
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency