August 12, 2026
Quick hits from across the AI world in the last 24 hours.
- ⚡ Quick hits
- Agents Xiaomi confirmed that its MiClaw agent will not support devices running HyperOS 4. IT之家 ↗
- Industry Fable 5’s slow enterprise adoption suggests corporate demand may be hitting a ceiling at frontier-model pricing. The Decoder ↗
- Safety Researchers from leading AI labs warned that automated AI research is advancing rapidly, with several milestones they predicted already achieved. The Decoder ↗
- Models A report revealed the first model associated with Ilya Sutskever’s AI venture, offering an initial look at its technical direction. 量子位 ↗
- Industry Lenovo reported its strongest first-quarter performance to date, with rapidly expanding AI-server demand driving its infrastructure business. 量子位 ↗
- Research Tri Dao argued that AI’s next major performance gains will come from kernels, inference stacks and flexible infrastructure rather than one breakthrough architecture. Together AI on X ↗
- AIGC 360 and science program Knowledge Is Power launched Zhil·Nano, an AI platform for producing science-education and science-fiction films. 量子位 ↗
- Agents Honor unveiled Robot Phone, which it describes as the first smartphone designed around embodied interaction. 量子位 ↗
- Agents Google Cloud introduced Agent Plugins as reusable components that developers can build once and deploy across multiple agent environments. Google Cloud Tech on X ↗
- AIGC MiniMax scheduled a San Francisco showcase highlighting projects creators are already producing with its H3 AI-video technology. MiniMax on X ↗
- Agents GitHub promoted its Copilot app as a unified workspace for moving from ideas to code while managing ongoing projects. GitHub on X ↗
- Industry Nebius shares jumped 34% after the AI-infrastructure provider reported continued demand for computing capacity. SiliconANGLE ↗
- Agents VS Code added multilingual dictation that detects the speaker’s language and transcribes speech locally within chat and editing workflows. Visual Studio Code on X ↗
- Industry Two Cognition engineers won the DEF CON capture-the-flag competition, a notable security achievement for the AI-coding startup’s team. Cognition on X ↗
- Research An Apple patent describes using contextual signals to determine whether an iPhone notification should interrupt its user. IT之家 ↗
- Safety Researchers created a font that remains readable to humans while causing AI scraping systems to extract nonsensical text from webpages. Ars Technica ↗
- Research Arena introduced AutoEval, using a reward model trained on millions of human battles to reduce new-model evaluation cycles from weeks to hours. Arena on X ↗
- Agents Amazon introduced Quick, a workplace AI assistant that retrieves live information from multiple systems and can generate dashboards from a single prompt. AWS on X ↗
- Agents VS Code added Agent Plugins 1.0, packaging skills, MCP servers, and AI extensions into a single installable plugin. VS Code on X ↗
- Agents Claude in Chrome sessions now sync across desktop, web, and mobile, retaining conversations, skills, and connectors under the user’s account. Claude on X ↗
- Funding AI coding company Cognition is reportedly discussing a new fundraising round at a valuation of up to $40 billion. TechCrunch ↗
- Funding OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings raised $2 billion to acquire service businesses and apply AI across their operations. TechCrunch ↗
- AIGC Deemos demonstrated a Rodin Gen-2.5 Extreme-High generated model as a physical 3D print, highlighting detailed geometry and print readiness. Deemos Tech on X ↗
- Open Source Ai2 introduced downloadable OlmoEarth embeddings, letting users export customized geospatial representations from OlmoEarth Studio for downstream analysis. Hugging Face ↗
- Funding AI coding startup Lovable raised $400 million at a confirmed $13.3 billion valuation. TechCrunch ↗
- Research Microsoft Research released MindTopo, a benchmark showing multimodal models recognize static topology better than they preserve topological relationships during interactive planning. Microsoft Research ↗
- Agents Gemini announced upcoming MCP connections for Granola, Thumbtack, Zocdoc, and Zoho, enabling conversational access to meetings, appointments, services, and business data. Gemini on X ↗
- AIGC Runway Agent added Figma, Dropbox, and Notion connectors, allowing creators to synchronize assets directly from those services. Runway on X ↗