Claude Fable launch showcases an operating system and hardware prototypes ↗
An eight-day operating-system experiment helped fuel a thousand-comment discussion.
Model releases
Google puts a cheaper Gemini 4 in front of every Search user: Hydrogen is 2.5x faster and makes up facts 5x less, Google says ↗
Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, the fast, low-cost member of its Gemini 4 family, on Nov. 12 at 1:00 p.m. EST and is rolling it out to all Google Search users worldwide and in the Gemini app. Google says it edges out its pricier Argon model on a third-party intelligence index, runs 2.5x faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash and cuts fabricated claims more than fivefold, though its own model card shows it still trails a rival on some coding and computer-use tests.
Alibaba Gives an Early Look at Qwen4: Qwen4-Max Preview Reads a Million Tokens at Once, but It Expires in 15 Days and Comes With No Benchmarks ↗
On the morning of Nov. 11 Beijing time, Alibaba said its next-generation Qwen4 model family is coming and opened a preview of the flagship Qwen4-Max on its Token Plan subscription. The model targets coding and AI-agent work, takes images and video, and handles a 1-million-token context. Alibaba has not released benchmarks, a parameter count or a technical report, and the preview shuts off on Nov. 25.
Baidu's ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview: 280 billion parameters, 14 billion active, a wuxia game coded in one 11-hour run, and open weights promised by Nov. 25 ↗
On November 11, Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview, the first post-trained model built on its previously open-sourced ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base. It has 280 billion total parameters, 14 billion active per token, and a 1-million-token context window. Baidu says it is strong at coding, 3D modeling, office work, and content creation, and showcased it building a third-person martial-arts game in Unreal Engine in a single 11-hour coding task. The API is live on Baidu Qianfan, and Baidu says the weights will be released under Apache 2.0 by November 25. Baidu also calls it an in-progress checkpoint that may still have gaps; the demos are the company's own claims.