Welcome back! Anthropic says small AI models may be months away from copying themselves onto cheap gadgets like TV boxes. Meta's new model jumped past Claude Fable and GPT-6 Astra. Epic told the team behind its Marvel and Star Wars game to stop writing code by hand to use AI. And Google's AI cracked math problems that had stumped people for more than 50 years.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
Anthropic: Could your cheap smart gadgets end up hosting a rogue AI?
Meta: Which Claude model did Meta's new AI just beat?
Epic Games: Who's writing the code for Epic's Marvel and Star Wars game now?
Google: How did Google's AI crack math problems that stumped people for 50 years?
Anthropic says AI will split to keep itself alive via cheap devices
Anthropic bought 15 cheap Android TV boxes for about $55 each, networked them together and ran an AI model across all of them.
Each box held a small slice of the model.
Its red team, which hunts for worst-case risks, says small AI models may be months away from copying themselves onto gadgets like these with no data center needed. Smart ovens and robot vacuums could host a piece of one too.
A copy like that could figure out devices it has never seen before, and there'd be no single off switch to hit.
A small model got an AI running on 8 of the 9 kinds of hardware Anthropic tested.
GLM-5.2, a Chinese model anyone can download, spread itself to all 8 computers in a test network in 4 of 5 runs, with no passwords in its way.
Copies that left notes for the next one got better at it, going from 45% success to as high as 84%.
A network of hacked gadgets called Kimwolf already took over more than 2 million devices, mostly cheap Android TV boxes.
When internet providers cut off infected customers during a past outbreak, 92% of infections were gone within two weeks.
Anthropic expects small models to catch up to GLM-5.2 by the end of this year if they keep improving at the same pace.
It says nobody has a fully working rogue copy yet, and the first ones would be slow, taking a day or two to make each new copy.
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Meta's new AI beats Claude Fable
Meta's new Muse Wonder Full scores 56 on Artificial Analysis's independent ranking of AI models. Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra both score 53.
Only Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher, at 58, and Sonnet 5.5 ties it.
It's the most capable model yet from the AI lab Mark Zuckerberg rebuilt from scratch 14 months ago.
Meta built it for long jobs like coding projects and legal paperwork.
Meta says it remembers what matters to you across chats and keeps going when it hits a wall.
The full version only comes with Muse Code, Meta's coding app, starting at $50 a month.
Developers can get the regular Wonder at the same price as Claude Opus 5.5.
Neither version can be downloaded and run on your own computer, a break from Meta's old Llama models.
Subscribers to Muse, the app TIME caught keeping files on you and your friends last week, get Wonder next.
Epic banned hand-written code on its Marvel and Star Wars game
Epic Games told the team making its Marvel and Star Wars shooter to go AI-first with Anthropic's Claude, Bloomberg reports.
"No more hand-written code."
That's what one of the game's directors wrote in an internal message. The same director said all of the game's art would be made with AI too.
The game was due in March 2027 and is now delayed, with no new date.
Bloomberg says Epic underestimated how many people and how much time it needed.
Developers were stunned when they heard the news on a video call in early October.
Disney put $1.5 billion into Epic in 2024, and this is meant to be the first game from that deal.
Too bad for Disney, because this news upset a lot of gamers on X. People won’t be as excited about the game.
CEO Tim Sweeney calls it a huge pivot meant to let everyone at Epic build more and better stuff.
When a critic told him he couldn't read the room, Sweeney said much of the room wants it to be 2016 again and he’s trying to keep up with tech advancements. What do you think?
Google's AI cracked math problems open for 50 years
Google DeepMind's AlphaProof Nexus solved 9 open Erdős problems, puzzles left by the famous mathematician Paul Erdős. Two of them had stumped people for more than 50 years.
The results passed peer review and came out in Science last week, while OpenAI's 722 AI-written papers went straight to GitHub.
It took a swing at 353 Erdős problems, so most attempts failed.
It also proved 44 of 492 open guesses about number patterns from an online encyclopedia of sequences.
Google's Gemini writes each proof in Lean, a math language where a computer checks every step.
When a step fails, the error goes back to the AI so it can try again.
The researchers say even the AI's failed attempts helped mathematicians understand the problems better.
The director of Spain's Institute of Mathematical Sciences says we're getting more and more results we know are true that nobody fully understands.
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Check the dates it found and tap save.
Pick when you want the heads-up, from 1 hour to 2 days before.
Who it's for: anyone who's ever paid a late fee on a bill they forgot.
Everything else you shouldn't miss
A man got 18 months for streaming AI songs with bots: his fake accounts pulled in $8 million in royalties and once outstreamed Taylor Swift's whole catalog on YouTube Music family plans.
Microsoft is reportedly on track to pay Anthropic over $2 billion a year for Copilot: its new Office chief pushed to put Claude in Copilot even though it costs more.
OpenAI nearly doubled how much Codex can keep in mind at once: GPT-6.1 Sol's default memory in Codex goes from 272K to 500K tokens on day 7 of the 28-day upgrade-or-reset promise.
Musk says only OpenAI, Anthropic and Cursor had enough coding data to build superintelligence: that's why his company bought Cursor, he said, and Google arguably makes four.
Bettors give the next Claude Fable a 62% chance of landing within two weeks: the Polymarket odds come a week after Anthropic shipped Haiku 5.5.
Three officials from the US government's AI testing agency are reportedly moving into the White House: the agency is called the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence.
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