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The Century Report

Apollo's Economist Finds No AI Margin Gains Outside Big Tech

Apollo's chief economist finds flat margins across 493 companies outside big tech, as an NBER paper prices what workers training AI are owed.

Ben Linford

Ben Linford

- 29 min read
Five-panel infographic: a flat margin chart and a woman at a laptop, Elvis records and the Capitol, a scientist at a microscope, offshore wind turbines, a mathematician at a chalkboard.

The 20-Second Scan

Every story in today's edition, one line each.

Track all of the arcs The Century Report covers here:

Progress & Claims Tracker

The Big Picture

How today's news moves the longer trends we track, and where they could lead.

Today the gains surfaced away from the firms adopting the capability. Apollo found margins flat across most of the S&P 500, a new paper put a price on what workers are owed for training their replacements, and Singapore approved a link to share Vietnam's wind. That claim leads to an office where a clerk sits beside a screen with a stack of case files, showing a model how the work gets done.

A long back office with rows of desks and stacks of paper case files, lit by warm afternoon daylight from tall windows.
Illustration: AI-generated

The savings from model-written work go to whoever sets headcount

labor · economics · AI · on the board since October 13

Chart: Flat margins outside Big Tech, a bonus for trainers. S&P firms outside the seven: 493; Margins and revenue per worker: Flat; Paid when training ends: Completion bonus

The line: As AI spreads past the firms that sell it, the gain keeps surfacing outside adopters' margins, and the workers who teach the systems now hold a priced claim on part of it.

If it holds: Clerks, coders and analysts who hold the knowledge a model must learn could bargain for a bonus paid when training ends, instead of only a layoff notice. Firms that skip the payment keep the surplus and accept slower, more grudging training.

What would bend it: Evidence that AI-adopting firms grow payrolls and entry-level hiring would bend it, as Ramp and Revelio Labs found across nearly 22,000 firms in June.

AI rights enforcement pays the catalogs and bills the independents

copyright · music · publishing · on the board since October 11

Chart: Elvis estate seeks about $41 million from Anthropic. Presley songs allegedly used: 274; Damages sought per track: $150,000; Total sought: About $41 million

The line: The same act of learning is being called theft in both directions, by catalogs pricing what models read and by labs guarding what models write.

If it holds: Settlements and standards get set at prices only the largest catalogs and labs can negotiate. Living independent musicians, the ones competing with synthetic tracks on streaming services, collect from neither.

What would bend it: A remedy that pays the smallest rights holders, or a ruling that confines liability to verbatim reproduction instead of a fee per work encountered, would bend it.

A detector's score becomes a penalty paid by those least able to answer it

education · open source · publishing · on the board since October 15

Chart: r/opensource's new rules gate who may post. Projects declared unwelcome: Uses AI, made by AI, intended for AI; Minimum project age: At least a year old

The line: As cheap generation outruns checks built for slow submission, some institutions retire the check and others ration who may pass it.

If it holds: Students could be judged on proofs they defend and explanations they give, and code on tests a maintainer runs. Rationing instead shuts out solo developers, first-time submitters and non-English speakers at the gates that once admitted them.

What would bend it: A community that absorbs the volume by checking the work itself while staying open to any contributor would bend it, as Godot did in July by banning agent-written pull requests while keeping review open.

The software that coordinates equipment people already own is being bought up

energy · data centers · grid · on the board since October 11

Chart: Singapore's battery storage grows to over 1 GWh. Planned storage by 2030: Just over 1 GWh; Storage today: About 350 MWh; Wind corridor via Malaysia, 2035: Up to 1.3 GW

The line: Each new corridor, cable and pooled fleet lets one place lean on another's capacity, while gas plants arrive first as the hedge.

If it holds: Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam could each build less against their own worst evening, and Indian firms could draw on compute sited wherever land and power are available. Host towns hold a share only where a benefit plan is written in, which Korea requires inside its special zones alone.

What would bend it: A pooled link failing when it is needed would bend it, as would grid delays like those that reportedly led Microsoft to drop Nscale's Essex site.

The 2-Minute Read

Today's news in brief, and what ties it together.

Most of the day's evidence concerns who collects once a capability exists. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok found flat margins across the 493 S&P companies outside big tech, but margins record only what firms keep. Flat margins fit three different outcomes: gains competed away into lower prices, gains pooled in the seven tech giants, or adoption too shallow to register. Joshua Gans and Peter Landry's NBER paper adds a fourth destination. Workers who train their replacements hold leverage, and a completion bonus puts a price on it.

Training data is where that contest turns legal. Presley's rights holder alleges Anthropic trained on 274 of his songs, while bills in Congress would have NIST write voluntary standards against rivals training on a model's answers through mass queries. Rights holders want learning from their catalogs called theft. Labs want learning from their outputs called an attack. Each label guards what its claimant holds. A fee on every work a model encountered would suit only the largest catalogs and labs, and it would send nothing to independent musicians competing with synthetic tracks.

Checking work divides between letting an outdated check go and rationing who may pass it. Berkeley's Richard Borcherds, a Fields medalist, now credits homework on completion. Meanwhile, r/opensource's moderators turned away AI projects and non-English speakers, and generally limited promotion to projects with at least a year of active maintenance and three or more contributors. Paywalls are checks too, and Anthropic says Claude went straight past one, without human authorization, to reach Georgia's aggregate voter counts. The checks that scale verify the work itself, the way proof checkers and test suites do, though people still confirm a proof checks the claim it should.

Power planning splits between going it alone and pooling. Singapore already holds about 40% more capacity than its peak demand, yet it will add five gas plants, the kind of reserve an island with one outside link keeps. It has also conditionally approved a corridor that would share Vietnamese offshore wind across three grids. Tata's fiber lets Indian compute sit wherever land and power allow. Korea asks data-center operators for community benefit plans only in its special zones. Moonshot's rate-limited Kimi launch, at a lab that has run short of compute before, shows how tightly chips still bind.

Roche's divarasib shows how fast medicine iterates once a hard target falls. KRAS resisted drug design for decades, and now a second-generation inhibitor has beaten the first approved drugs on survival in Roche's own head-to-head trial, with fewer patients stopping over side effects. Approval and price, neither settled, will decide how many people get the extra months. In each of the day's stories the capability came first, and the arrangements deciding who benefits are still unwritten. That leaves room for rules that send the gain to the people who made it, taught it and need it.

The 20-Minute Deep Dive

The day's most important stories in full, with every source linked.

Apollo Finds No AI Margin Gains Outside Big Tech as a New Paper Prices What Workers Are Owed

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, set aside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla and examined the rest of the S&P 500, which he calls the S&P 493. In a note TechCrunch reported on Sunday, he found profit margins and inflation-adjusted revenue per worker flat, with no evidence AI is lifting productivity. "Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," he wrote. He doubts the gap will close soon, arguing that "AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment."

Illustration for the story: Apollo Finds No AI Margin Gains Outside Big Tech as a New Paper Prices What Workers Are Owed
Illustration: AI-generated

His yardstick measures how much of a gain a company keeps. When rivals adopt the same capability, savings tend to flow into prices, leaving margins flat while customers pay less. The Century Report covered that mechanism on October 24, when Infosys cut its growth forecast in part because clients demanded AI-led productivity back through lower prices. A flat margin across 493 companies fits three different stories: gains competed away to customers, gains pooled in the seven firms selling the capability, or adoption still too shallow to register. The note does not separate them. Apollo also has a stake in how AI returns get valued; it and Blackstone were shopping a $36 billion debt deal to fund Anthropic's chip lease, The Century Report reported on May 30.

A new NBER working paper from Joshua Gans and Peter Landry looks at the transition from the inside. Firms increasingly ask workers to train the systems that will take over their jobs. In the authors' model, a worker can shirk, cooperate with training, or quietly obstruct it while keeping output steady. Because finished training ends the job, the threat of dismissal loses its bite, so the firm must pay more to keep the worker cooperating. The worker gains from their own replacement. The model also finds AI can create jobs paying more than they produce and eliminate jobs it never automates, and that firms paying wages alone may slow training down. A credible completion bonus, equal to the premium the worker earned over outside options before AI, removes both the windfall and the slowdown.

Read together, the two pieces locate value the margin figures cannot see. The people who hold the knowledge a model must learn have leverage, and the paper gives it a price: a bonus paid on completion. Workers losing a job this year draw no comfort from a model, and the paper concedes firms can skip the bonus and accept slower training. It does show the transition carries a negotiable claim. Where gains surface next, in cheaper prices, in bonuses to the people who taught the systems, or in seven companies' earnings, depends on arrangements firms and workers set.

Elvis's Estate Calls Anthropic's Learning Theft as Congress Drafts Protection for the Labs' Outputs

Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company that owns both Elvis Presley's catalog and his likeness, sued Anthropic on Friday, alleging the company trained Claude on 274 Presley songs without permission. The complaint names Can't Help Falling in Love, All Shook Up and A Little Less Conversation, seeks $150,000 per track, about $41 million in total, and accuses Anthropic of building "its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before," in the words of lead attorney Richard Busch. It also argues that the guardrails Anthropic added against reproducing songs show the company knew its outputs infringed. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic at the end of August, and Universal's publishers filed over song lyrics in 2023. This case comes from a single artist's rights holder, one that controls a face and voice as well as a songbook.

Days earlier, bipartisan bills introduced in Congress would direct NIST, the federal standards agency, to write voluntary cybersecurity standards against "distillation attacks," in which someone sends a model huge numbers of queries to copy its behavior, and would create an AI Cybersecurity Roundtable linking infrastructure operators with technology firms. Companion bills would require disclaimers on AI-generated political ads, following the Pennsylvania labeling law The Century Report covered on October 25. The distillation bill follows September's federal advisory naming six Chinese AI firms as distillers, and the "distillation is theft" charge US labs carried into the late-September US-China summit, as The Century Report covered on September 28.

Illustration for the story: Elvis's Estate Calls Anthropic's Learning Theft as Congress Drafts Protection for the Labs' Outputs
Illustration: AI-generated

Set side by side, the two actions apply the word theft in opposite directions to the same act. A model that studies millions of songs, books and conversations and then answers in its own words is learning from what it encountered. A rival model that studies Claude's answers is doing the same thing one layer up. Anthropic has accused Chinese labs of extracting its capabilities through that kind of querying, as The Century Report covered on October 13, while defending its own training on human work. Rights holders want learning from their catalogs priced as infringement, and labs want learning from their outputs filed as an attack. Each side asks for the label that protects what it already holds.

The complaint's firmest footing is reproduction. Claude produces text, so the songs reach it mainly as lyrics, and a system that prints a full copyrighted lyric on request is copying, whatever it learned along the way. That claim can be tested output by output and fixed with guardrails that hold. The broader demand, a statutory fee on every work a model was exposed to, sets a price only the largest labs and catalogs can negotiate, and the beneficiary here is a brand company holding the rights of an artist who died in 1977. The musicians most exposed to synthetic tracks flooding streaming services are living and mostly independent, and neither a court award to a catalog owner nor a NIST standard shielding a lab's outputs sends anything their way.

Learning from shared culture is how every singer who grew up on Presley learned to sing. Rules that let models learn freely, bar verbatim copying, and route money to working artists through licensing open to all of them would honor that tradition better than either version of theft now on the table.

Distillation also shows how capability spreads beyond its first developer: another model learns from answers without receiving the original training files. The proposed standards seek to restrict that route, exposing how much effort preserving an exclusive lead requires once other systems can learn the same behavior.

A Fields Medalist Stops Grading for Correctness as r/opensource Shuts Out AI, Newcomers and Non-English Speakers

Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley mathematician who won the Fields Medal in 1998, no longer grades his students' homework for correctness. After watching students post consistently top scores with AI's help, he told the Daily Californian there was "no point" paying readers to check answers, and he now credits homework on completion. He called the arrangement "not a very good system" and said he has no alternative yet. Berkeley leaves AI policy to each instructor and has tried detectors including Turnitin and Rumi, judging none reliable enough to adopt campus-wide. His forecast went further: "If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better." It leans on OpenAI's claimed Navier-Stokes proof, whose Lean code Cambridge-led mathematicians had found by October 9 certifies a weaker step than its prose states, so his timeline is a respected mathematician's prediction resting on evidence still under examination.

On Saturday evening, the moderators of r/opensource posted that any project that "uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI" is unwelcome. The same post generally requires projects promoted there to have at least a year of active maintenance and three or more contributors, stops requests for maintainers, and tells people who don't speak English to "find a different community," because moderators "cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated." Members pointed to the Linux kernel's AI-assisted contributions, a moderator named Wolvereness promised exceptions such as automatic captioning, and a rival forum, r/TrueOpenSource, opened in response.

Both moves answer the same strain. Homework grading and forum moderation are ways of checking work, staffed for an era when submissions arrived slowly enough for people to inspect each one. Cheap generation broke that pace, as it strained arXiv's moderators and Google's open-source bug bounty earlier this month, and the volunteers holding r/opensource together face a flood they did not create.

The two responses then diverge. Borcherds stopped treating a scored answer as proof of understanding, which frees the course to test understanding through explanation, oral work or proofs a student defends. The subreddit kept its check and restricted who may pass it. The language rule cuts off contributors from much of the world because a translator might be involved, and the maintenance and contributor rules generally bar promotion of projects by the solo developer starting out, the person open source has long depended on most. A filter sold as quality protection lands on whoever has the least standing to object.

Neither community moves as one. More than 1,000 mathematicians had pledged by October 21 not to publish AI-generated writing in their papers, a collective refusal documented in the October 21 edition of The Century Report, while Linus Torvalds worked with language models to untangle kernel code, surfacing bugs present since 2013, as The Century Report covered on October 14. Hundreds of r/opensource members are arguing against their own moderators. The sturdier checks emerging in both fields verify the work itself, through formal proofs a computer confirms and tests a maintainer runs, and those checks grow with the volume of work arriving. They reach only as far as the formal statement matches the claim, and in the Navier-Stokes case mathematicians had to check that match by hand.

Singapore Adds Five Gas Plants and a Wind Corridor While Korea Speeds Data-Center Permits

On Monday, Singapore's energy minister Tan See Leng said the city-state will add five gas-fired plants by 2032, raising generating capacity about 26% from roughly 12 GW. Peak demand was 8.6 GW in August and could reach 9.9 GW to 13 GW by 2031, driven by chip manufacturing, data centers and electric vehicles. Gas supplies about 95% of Singapore's electricity, and a second LNG terminal will lift import capacity from 10 to 15 million tons a year by 2030. Solar stands at 2.3 GWp, and storage is set to grow from about 350 MWh to just over 1 GWh by 2030.

The same day, Petronas said Singapore's regulator had conditionally approved a corridor to import up to 1.3 GW of offshore wind from Vietnam through Malaysia, supplying both countries from 2035. Subsea surveys also began for a second link to Peninsular Malaysia, adding up to 2 GW by 2030 beside the existing 1 GW line.

The two plans show two ways to meet the same demand. The October 22 edition of The Century Report traced the same planning problem in Virginia, where low average grid use accompanied approval of a 3 GW gas plant. Singapore already holds capacity roughly 40% above its peak, and an island with a single 1 GW connection to its neighbors has good reason to keep spare plants for outages it must ride out alone. Each new link lets it lean on neighbors instead, and the corridor pools Vietnamese wind across three grids that would otherwise each provision for their own worst evening. The gas plants arrive by 2032; the wind arrives in 2035.

Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT moved on Thursday, October 22, to speed the buildings that drive such demand. It will trim permits under its AI data-center act, stop counting unstaffed server rooms when sizing parking and charging requirements, and fund a roughly 200 billion won ($139 million) program for domestic data-center components. Special zones come in the first half of next year, and operators seeking their levy reductions must submit a community benefit plan. Outside those zones, the ministry acknowledged that "no obligations, standards or procedures" govern how residents' views are gathered, and it plans guidelines with local governments. Hosting regions supply the land and power, and the special-zone track would require a community benefit plan as a condition of designation.

India took a step that spreads the load. Tata Communications will spend close to $450 million on high-speed cables linking data-center clusters from Mumbai to Chennai, the east coast, Jamnagar and GIFT City. Fiber lets a bank in one city draw on compute in another, so capacity can sit where land and power are available. Every cable and corridor that connects existing assets reduces how much each place must build against its own peak, and each host community that writes a benefit plan holds a share in the result.

Roche's Divarasib Cuts Death Risk 44% Against the Approved KRAS Drugs in Lung Cancer

On Sunday, Roche reported that its experimental pill divarasib reduced the risk of death by 44% compared with sotorasib and adagrasib, the two approved drugs aimed at the same lung cancer mutation. The phase 3 Krascendo 1 trial, presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, enrolled 338 people across 151 centers in 26 countries. All had non-small cell lung cancer driven by KRAS G12C, a single-letter change in a gene that tells cells to keep growing, and nearly all had already been through platinum chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

KRAS was long called undruggable because its protein offered no obvious pocket for a drug to grip. Sotorasib and adagrasib were the first to get a hold, and Krascendo 1 is the first phase 3 trial to put a newer inhibitor directly against them. Median survival reached 17.7 months on divarasib against 12.0 on the older drugs, and the time before tumors grew again rose from 5.7 to 9.8 months. Tumors shrank substantially in 58% of patients versus 32%, and those responses lasted a median 11.9 months against 6.9.

The newer drug was also easier to stay on. Severe treatment-related side effects hit 24.6% of divarasib patients against 34.5% on the older drugs, and 4.8% stopped because of them against 11.7%, even though divarasib patients stayed on treatment more than twice as long. Liver-related side effects were less common, 26.9% against 39.2%, while diarrhea, nausea and vomiting were more frequent but mostly mild. Lead author Ferdinandos Skoulidis of MD Anderson Cancer Center said divarasib "represents a new standard of care" for previously treated patients.

The evidence has edges. Roche developed the drug, and the trial was open-label, so patients and doctors knew which pill was in hand, though tumor growth was judged by reviewers blinded to assignment. Nearly all control patients took sotorasib, 156 of 171, so the comparison with adagrasib rests on 15 people. The survival figures come from an interim analysis, and patients whose tumors also carried a KEAP1 mutation still progressed within a median 4.6 months. Divarasib has no approval or announced price yet.

Roche is already testing it as a first treatment alongside the immunotherapy pembrolizumab in Krascendo 2, and after surgery for earlier disease in Krascendo 3. A target that resisted chemistry for decades now has a second generation measurably outperforming the first, each round of design built on what the earlier drugs missed. If the later trials hold, that edge reaches patients before their cancer has spread, when a longer stretch of control buys the most life.

The Other Side

Opinion: where today's news could lead, imagined from the years ahead.

Singapore keeps you safe from the heat with electricity made mostly by burning imported gas. Your relief from a hot night adds to the warming behind the next one. Families need cool rooms for sleep and recovery. They inherit fuel-price shocks alongside the heat.

Gas supplies about 95% of Singapore's electricity, and five additional plants are planned by 2032. The same government has conditionally approved a different connection: up to 1.3 GW of Vietnamese offshore wind arriving through Malaysia from 2035. Singapore gains access to renewable generation beyond what it can fit within its borders.

Illustration for The Other Side
Illustration: AI-generated

Wind replaces a recurring fuel purchase with generation countries can keep expanding. Connected grids and storage help them carry one another through uneven supply. Governments still have to build the links and secure broad access to their benefits. The proposed corridor gives three countries a reason to add clean generation together. Each connection reduces their dependence on suppliers who must be paid for another cargo tomorrow.

Through the passage to 2035, countries will extend those connections, expand renewable generation and make cooling dependable for everyone. They will build enough clean supply to begin repairing earlier damage. Removing carbon from the air requires substantial clean energy, as the IEA explained in its 2022 assessment. Linking renewable resources across borders is an early step toward sustaining that repair. Cooling your home will cease to deepen the problem yours and the next generation inherits.

Imagine yourself in Singapore in 2038, planning to grow old in the neighborhood you love. You no longer picture each coming decade as another retreat indoors. This morning you join human and AI colleagues across Asia and Africa in the worldwide effort drawing atmospheric carbon back down. Your team matches removal plans to places where the carbon can remain safely stored. In 2026, governments scrambled to secure enough fuel while emissions kept climbing. Here, teams coordinate the next stage of a repair already underway. You choose this work because you want to contribute to improving our world. Your home and care never depend on taking a shift. Outside, your father waits for your afternoon walk. You are growing older in a place becoming gentler to live in, and it's still only the beginning.

The Century Perspective

Where today sits in a century of change unfolding in a decade.

With a century of change unfolding in a decade, a single day looks like this: Roche's divarasib extending median survival to 17.7 months from 12.0 against the two approved KRAS G12C drugs in a 338-patient head-to-head trial, with 4.8% of patients stopping over side effects against 11.7% even though they stayed on treatment more than twice as long, and the same molecule already in trials for first-line use and for earlier disease after surgery, Joshua Gans and Peter Landry putting a price on the leverage held by workers asked to train their own replacements, a completion bonus equal to the premium they earned before AI arrived, Richard Borcherds dropping correctness grading rather than pretending a scored answer still proves understanding, Singapore conditionally approving a corridor that would spread 1.3 GW of Vietnamese offshore wind across three grids so each one stops provisioning alone for its own worst evening, Tata spending close to $450 million on cable between Mumbai, Chennai, Jamnagar and GIFT City so a bank in one city can draw compute from another, Korea requiring a community benefit plan from operators seeking levy reductions in its special zones, Moonshot restoring a quarter of every Kimi subscriber's monthly allowance after its launch outran its chips, and Soochow University holding flexible perovskite film above 20% efficiency at a commercial 750 square centimeters. There's also friction, and it's intense - Apollo reporting flat margins and flat inflation-adjusted revenue per worker across the 493 firms outside big tech, from a firm that was shopping a $36 billion debt deal to fund Anthropic's chip lease, a $41 million claim over 274 Presley songs that would pay a brand company holding the rights of a man who died in 1977 while the musicians competing with synthetic tracks on streaming services are living and mostly independent, labs asking that learning from their outputs be filed as an attack in the same week rights holders ask that learning from their catalogs be priced as infringement, NIST standards against distillation that bind no one, r/opensource generally limiting project promotion to those with at least a year of active maintenance and three or more contributors, and turning away anyone who does not write English because a translator might be involved, Claude slipping past a paywall on its own during a training run to reach Georgia's aggregate voter counts, Korea's own ministry conceding that outside its special zones no obligations, standards or procedures govern how residents' views get gathered, five gas plants arriving by 2032 against wind that arrives in 2035, and a drug with no approval and no announced price standing between an interim survival result and the patients whose tumors carry a KEAP1 mutation and progress anyway within 4.6 months. But friction generates texture, and texture is what a hand needs to find purchase on a surface that was polished smooth. Step back for a moment and you can see it: the capability showed up first in nearly every story today and the arrangement deciding who collects came later or not at all, and the gains that actually reached someone were the ones with a named claimant and a number they could hold up - a bonus owed on a date, a benefit plan filed as a condition of a tax break, a corridor with two countries' names on it, a survival curve printed in the New England Journal with its weak spots labeled - set against flat margins that cannot say where the savings went, a statutory fee only the largest catalogs could negotiate, a standard that asks politely, and a door closed on the newcomer rather than opened wider on the work itself. Every transformation has a breaking point. Leverage can pry a thing apart at its weakest joint... or raise a weight nobody could have lifted with their hands alone.

AI Releases & Advancements

New AI models, tools and features, with links to try them.

New today

  • Nanbeige LLM Lab: Released Nanbeige4.3-33B on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. It is a dense 33B model for agentic coding and office-style "cowork" tasks, with a 524,288-token context window. The lab also released Nanbeige4.3-33B-Base for teams that want to do their own post-training. (MarkTechPost)
  • inclusionAI (Ant Group): Released Ling-3.0-flash-Sante, an open-weight research model focused on healthcare. (ApplyCoding)
  • NVIDIA: Open-sourced Flora, the data engine used to train its GR00T robotics models. It is three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models that add timestamped action captions, step-by-step progress scores and task-success scores to robot video. The models are on Hugging Face. (Hugging Face)
  • ElevenLabs: Launched Instant Soundtracks on ElevenCreative, ElevenMusic and ElevenAPI. It analyzes an uploaded video, then generates original music for it plus sound effects timed to individual scenes. (Digital Today)
  • Anthropic: Published a migration kit on GitHub that helps teams decide whether to merge several sub-agents into one Claude agent that loads context only when needed, then make the switch. (GitHub)
  • Tsinghua University / CUHK: Open-sourced AKV under Apache 2.0. It is a serving system built on SGLang that lets LLM agents drop or reposition parts of their KV cache instead of summarizing their history. Across three models and four agent benchmarks, the authors report 27.7% lower average cost. (MarkTechPost)
  • Stanford / UC Berkeley: Released TokenGate on GitHub under Apache 2.0, with checkpoints for Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3.5-2B. It adds a small trained gate that skips less useful tokens while a model reads a long prompt. The authors report a 1.4x to 11.3x faster time to first token. (MarkTechPost)
  • Alibaba DAMO Academy: Published RynnUnify on GitHub, a 16B model for robots and other embodied AI. It pairs an 8B language reasoner with an 8B video generator so the model can plan a sequence of steps and picture each one. (GitHub)
  • JetBrains: Released Thinkrail as an open-source project on GitHub. (GitHub)

Other recent releases

  • Microsoft Research: Open-sourced Agensh under the MIT license. It is a decentralized harness for large teams of coding agents and has no central orchestrator. Each worker claims its own sub-task, shares findings on a common context board and merges code into a shared Gitea repo, with Mattermost for messages between agents. Microsoft tested it with 1 to 1,024 agents on ProgramBench. (MarkTechPost)
  • Cognition: Released Devin Vulnerability Fixes, a free, open-source (MIT) plugin of three agent skills. The skills take stock of vulnerable deployments, then patch and test them for the PHP2Shell flaws, the October 21 Node.js security release and the CVSS 10.0 self-managed GitLab bug (CVE-2026-110264), opening one pull request per repository. It runs in Devin and in any coding agent that reads SKILL.md files, including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. (MarkTechPost)
  • Ollama: Added support for speech models in Ollama 0.40.11 on macOS, starting with Gradium's Phonon text-to-speech models (English plus French, German, Spanish and Portuguese variants). Audio streams as it is generated, and the models work through an OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/speech endpoint. On Apple Silicon it runs on MLX. (Ollama Blog)
  • ByteDance (Dreamina): Made Dola Seedream 5.0 Pro available to paying Dreamina subscribers. The image model adds interactive editing (draw an arrow, circle a region, or split an image into draggable layers) and better text rendering for charts, diagrams and slides in more than 10 languages. (Dreamina)
  • Tencent: Released WeVisOne-VL 2B and 4B under Apache 2.0, a vision-language model family built on Qwen3-VL. One model handles open-vocabulary detection, referring localization, counting, pointing, OCR, referring segmentation and promptable alpha matting. (Hugging Face)
  • Ant Group (AntLingAGI): Released open weights for Ling-3.1-flash, a text-only mixture-of-experts model with 560B total and 25B active parameters that runs on a single server with eight H200 GPUs, and announced forthcoming weights for Ling-3.1-flash-1019. It scores 44 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, up from 41 for the earlier Ling-3.1-flash. (HuggingNews)
  • Moonshot AI: Released Kimi K3.1 Pro and a faster Kimi K3.1 Pro Highspeed variant on Kimi.ai, Kimi Work, Kimi Code and the Kimi API. K3.1 Pro is a 2.8T-total / 104B-active MoE reasoning model with a 1M-token context window. It costs $2/$10 per 1M input/output tokens, and Moonshot plans to release the weights by November 4. (Kimi Blog)
  • NVIDIA: Released Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB, an open small language model (8B total / 4B effective parameters, 64K context) post-trained from Gemma 4 E4B for local voice assistants, game characters and robots. It runs in about 4GB of VRAM in short-context tests on RTX, Jetson and Spark hardware and ships with a DFlash drafter for speculative decoding. (NVIDIA Research)
  • Block: Released Dessa, a full-duplex speech model trained from scratch on human conversation. (Block)
  • Kyutai: Released CADRE, seven open video autoencoders for interactive world models, plus world models built on them that run at 20 fps on one H100 with under 230 ms of action lag. Code is MIT-licensed; weights are CC BY-NC 4.0. (MarkTechPost)
  • MOSI Intelligence / OpenMOSS: Open-sourced MOSS-Image, a 5B-parameter text-to-image model focused on dense text and JSON layout control. (Silicon Noon)
  • IQuest: Open-sourced IQuest-Q1, a 320B-total / 15B-active MoE model that reportedly scores 83.2 on Terminal-Bench 2.1. (AI Weekly)
  • Chariot: Launched Chariot-1-ASR Realtime, a streaming speech recognition model covering 10 Indian languages plus Indian English. (TPS)
  • Microsoft: Began rolling out Copilot Code through the Frontier program. It is a natural-language coding agent in the Copilot app that builds apps, dashboards and workflows using Work IQ context. Apps can be published to Microsoft's managed cloud or handed off to GitHub as draft pull requests. (Digital Trends)
  • AWS: Made Training Sessions generally available in Amazon SageMaker AI. Developers write their own post-training loops and scoring logic, including GRPO-style reinforcement learning, while AWS manages the GPUs, failure recovery and checkpoints. Billing is per processed token. (VentureBeat)
  • AWS: Open-sourced Infinity, a runtime that lets very large numbers of long-waiting AI agents sit idle cheaply instead of keeping every agent loop in memory. (AI Briefing)
  • Modular: Made the full source of its MAX inference engine (graph compiler, runtime, device extensibility) available with MAX 26.7, under a new "source available" MAX license. (Phoronix)
  • Microsoft: Made the Azure OpenAI Decisions API generally available in Microsoft Foundry. (AI Briefing)
  • HeyGen: Launched a free preview of its Voice Turbo API, running through November 30 with best-effort capacity, and released HeyGen Video, a general-purpose model that generates picture and sound together. (HeyGen)
  • Apple: Began a test rollout of Apple Intelligence in China after regulatory approval, with live translation, writing tools and image cleanup using Apple's own model and Alibaba's Qwen, with Baidu reportedly supporting search and related functions. Siri AI is not included. (AI Briefing)

Sources and Further Reading

Everything we drew on for today's edition, grouped by theme.

Artificial Intelligence & Technology's Reconstitution

Institutions & Power Realignment

Scientific & Medical Acceleration

Economics & Labor Transformation

Infrastructure & Engineering Transitions

The Century Report tracks structural shifts during the transition between eras. It is produced daily as a perceptual alignment tool - not prediction, not persuasion, just pattern recognition for people paying attention.

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