September 23, 2026
Quick hits from across the AI world in the last 24 hours.
- ⚡ Quick hits
- Funding Basecamp Research raised $140 million to use evolutionary data and AI for drug discovery. SiliconANGLE ↗
- Funding Enveda raised $311 million to advance nature-derived AI drug candidates into clinical trials. TechCrunch ↗
- Safety OpenAI introduced MentalHealthBench, an open benchmark designed to evaluate realistic conversations across the full spectrum of mental-health needs. X / OpenAI ↗
- Open Source NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Diarization, a 100-million-parameter open-weight model that tracks up to eight overlapping speakers in real time. MarkTechPost ↗
- Agents Cognition added native Microsoft Teams support and connected Devin to Outlook, Calendar, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Directory. X / Cognition ↗
- Industry Google expanded Beam, its glasses-free 3D video communication platform, with new regions, partners, and customers. Google Blog ↗
- Research Microsoft Research found that offloading robot inference to edge or cloud GPUs improved task success, responsiveness, battery life, and model capacity. Microsoft Research ↗
- Industry OpenAI said its Academy has reached more than four million people and will expand through a community trainer program. OpenAI ↗
- Models An Anthropic engineer said Claude’s writing quality declined because training increasingly optimized for AI-readable prose rather than human readers. IT之家 ↗
- AIGC Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS let users design voices from text prompts across more than 100 languages. Google DeepMind ↗
- Agents Meta’s Muse AI agent reportedly attracted 500,000 users in one week, while critics alleged it copied OpenClaw. The Decoder ↗
- AIGC Recraft launched V4.1 Flash, claiming image generation in 1.3 seconds and availability through official partner fal. X / Recraft ↗
- AIGC YouTube announced AI tools for Creator Studio, including script coaching, smart thumbnails, Gemini editing, and customizable recommendation feeds. The Verge ↗
- AIGC ElevenLabs released Scribe v2 Medical, offering HIPAA-eligible deployment with zero-retention mode and pricing starting at $0.22 per hour. X / ElevenLabs ↗
- Funding Ema raised $77 million to deploy AI employees across enterprise human resources, IT, and finance departments. SiliconANGLE ↗