Show Notes
Nvidia-backed Reflection unveiled Beam, a US open-weights model taking on Chinese labs. Plus, SemiAnalysis said Claude subscriptions were a better deal than OpenAI's, Meta and Microsoft cut back on Claude, Mistral dropped le Chonk, and ChatGPT faked New Yorker cartoonists' signatures.
NYC-based Reflection unveils Beam, an open model it says rivals GLM-5.2 on reasoning while using 3x-4x less compute and approaches Qwen3.8-Max on agentic tasks (Semafor)
Nvidia-backed Reflection pitches Beam to businesses and developers as a cheaper option for coding and agent tasks; the startup has held talks to raise $2.5B at a $25B valuation (Bloomberg)
Analysis: for agentic workloads, Anthropic's plans with Claude Opus 5.5 offer ~5x more API-equivalent value per month than OpenAI's plans with GPT-6.1 Sol (SemiAnalysis)
Sources: Meta and Microsoft are working to cut internal Claude use; Meta employees using Claude Code dropped to ~30,000 from ~60,000 earlier in 2026 (The Information)
Mistral releases Mistral Large 4, dubbed “le Chonk”, a 1T-parameter open-weight model for general agentic capabilities, trained on 4,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs (The Deep View)
ChatGPT is not only using New Yorker cartoonists' style but also adding their signatures to the fake cartoons it creates, which have gone viral on social media (Nieman Lab)
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