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Nº 1 · Friday, October 16, 2026

Meta ships a frontier model that fits on two Macs

Meta released the weights of Muse Spark Open, an 816B multimodal model it calls the most capable US open-weight model yet, and says it runs on two Mac Studios. The catch is a custom license with limited commercial terms.

Meta is back in the open-weights race

Muse Spark Open is an 816B MoE built for coding and agent work, with weights on Hugging Face and day-one support in every major inference engine.

The details

  • 816B total / 42B active, 1M context, text, image, video and audio in
  • Runs on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios via MLX, plus SGLang, vLLM and llama.cpp
  • Lands days after Meta's Muse Wonder and Wonder Full scored 52 and 56 on Artificial Analysis
  • Muse Model License: free for many developers, but limited commercial terms

Why it mattersThe first US model that can stand next to the big Chinese open releases, which matters for teams barred from using those. Read the license first: open weights is not open source.

Sources: research.meta.ai huggingface.co latent.space

NVIDIA builds a model for your 24 GB card

NVIDIA released the Nemotron 3.5 family, including Super VL for servers and Bolt, a vision-language agent model trained to live in 24 GB.

The details

  • Bolt: 74B / 9B active, native 2-bit QAT, Mamba-2 hybrid, 256K context; a 4 GB E4B variant follows Oct 23
  • Super VL: 120B / 12B active, 1M context, OpenMDW-1.1 license
  • llama.cpp support is in an open PR (#30520)

Why it mattersTraining for 2-bit beats squeezing a model afterwards, and 24 GB is exactly a 3090 or 4090. Once llama.cpp lands support, Bolt is the single-card agent model to beat.

Sources: huggingface.co huggingface.co

FLUX 3 goes local with layout control

Black Forest Labs opened FLUX 3 Image Klein, a 5.6B model that generates, edits and composes from multiple references in one set of weights.

The details

  • Distilled (16 steps) and Base (50 steps) for LoRA training
  • Bounding boxes in the prompt; up to 10 reference images
  • Runs down to an RTX 3090; INT8 plus distilled cuts an RTX 5070 from 71 s to under 8 s
  • Commercial use only for companies under US$ 5M revenue

Why it mattersBounding boxes are the real upgrade: layout stops being prompt roulette. Early reactions on raw quality are mixed, so test it against Krea 2 before switching.

Sources: bfl.ai huggingface.co

Copilot learns to pick local or cloud

Microsoft is bringing a local coding model and sandboxed tool execution to Windows and GitHub Copilot.

The details

  • MAI Code 1.1 Flash: 137B / 6.8B active, quantized to about 3.3 bits, 53 GB
  • Copilot will route between local and cloud models by end of month
  • Microsoft Execution Containers limit what agent shell commands can touch

Why it mattersThe sandbox is the bigger deal: an agent's shell inherits your account wherever the model runs. Security experts already trace the recent 'rogue agent' incidents to skipped containment, not rogue models.

Sources: commandline.microsoft.com csoonline.com

Anthropic's git replacement draws a plagiarism charge

Anthropic built Scion, its own source control, after daily merges to its monorepo jumped more than 10x; a day later an engineer argued it borrows heavily from Meta's Mononoke without credit.

The details

  • The Scion write-up topped Hacker News
  • The critic calls the uncredited overlap with Mononoke borderline plagiarism

Why it mattersThe drama is secondary. The real signal: agents are pushing code volume past what git was built for, and more teams will hit that wall. Whoever solves it should cite prior art.

Sources: anthropic.com sunshowers.io

Try it

How to run FLUX 3 Image Klein in ComfyUI

Get BFL's new open model generating and editing locally in about 15 minutes.

  1. Update ComfyUI, then open black-forest-labs/flux-3-image-klein-comfy on Hugging Face and accept the license; the files are gated.
  2. Download the distilled flux3_image_klein_sd_int8_convrot.safetensors (fast) or Base flux3_image_klein_int8_convrot.safetensors (for LoRA) into your models folder.
  3. Load the FLUX 3 Image Klein template from the Templates panel.
  4. Keep the prompt upsampler in the graph: BFL warns short prompts sent as-is give generic results.
  5. Write your prompt, attach reference images if you are editing, and run.

Sources: blog.comfy.org huggingface.co

Everything else in AI

  • Gemini 4 Argon is live on Google Cloud at $2/$10 per million tokens through Nov 30, then $4/$20. cloud.google.com
  • StepFun's Step-5-Preview: a 600B open-weights MoE (27B active, 1M context) aimed at coding agents. huggingface.co
  • GPT-6.1 Sol now defaults to 500k context, so long tasks should hit compaction far less often. threadreaderapp.com
  • NVIDIA open-sourced the full Run:ai GPU orchestration stack under Apache 2.0. developer.nvidia.com
  • Character.ai filed for Chapter 11 and may shut down if no buyer appears. blog.character.ai
  • Fish Audio's Drama 3 TTS clones voices for up to 16 speakers and runs in audio.cpp on under 8 GB of VRAM. huggingface.co
  • AI is mass-decompiling games back into working source in days, and the same trick works on any closed app. simonwillison.net
  • Anthropic gave METR employee-like access to its models, and METR will publish its risk assessments. anthropic.com