September 18, 2026
Quick hits from across the AI world in the last 24 hours.
- ⚡ Quick hits
- Research Epoch AI reports that 25% of August math arXiv preprints acknowledged AI, up from 4% in April. Epoch AI Research ↗
- Industry NVIDIA introduced Dynamo AIPerf, a tool for measuring LLM time-to-first-token, inter-token latency, throughput, and latency under traffic. NVIDIA AI ↗
- AIGC Pika launched Product Ad, an app that turns product imagery into creative advertising concepts rather than simple promotional montages. Pika ↗
- Models Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 claims first place among 32 streaming models while keeping streaming pricing at $0.20 per audio hour. xAI ↗
- Open Source PrismML released Ternary Bonsai 2 27B, an Apache-2.0 model reported at 5.9 GB while retaining 98.2% of Qwen3.8 27B performance. MarkTechPost ↗
- Agents Replit expanded Free Mode to provide thirty times more usage, including additional chat, projects, designs, and slide decks. Replit ↗
- AIGC Runway added alpha-channel preservation to Ruby’s HDR conversion workflow, allowing transparent video elements to survive processing. Runway ↗
- Agents LlamaIndex began a Parsed by LlamaParse series examining how document parsing errors affect consequential AI systems. LlamaIndex ↗
- Industry Google added new experts to its AI and Economy team to study how artificial intelligence reshapes markets and institutions. Google ↗
- Industry OpenAI introduced Astra for Law, a GPT-6 Astra configuration with legal search and workflows aimed at firms and legal technology companies. OpenAI ↗
- Agents MiniMax opened its Code CLI, giving developers a command-line interface for using its coding model in local development workflows. MiniMax ↗