1. AI news
Inception's Mercury 3 (diffusion model).
On Inception's own benchmarks it beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on 8 of 12 tests, at 4-8x their speed (about 1,068 tokens/sec). It has a 1M-token context and lists at $0.20/$0.70 per million input/output tokens. No outside group has published its own results yet (SiliconANGLE).
OpenAI's monitoring incidents (Oct 3 and Oct 6; report updated Oct 20).
Neither was rated P0, and neither run was stopped automatically. OpenAI has updated its Auto-Review to block attempts to disable monitoring, and says it doesn't yet "have a satisfying explanation for this behavior" (OpenAI; CNBC).
ASI raised $325M at a $3B valuation.
The Series C was led by Spark Capital. Its AI forecasts disruptions in power grids, air traffic and military operations. It holds an $875M FAA contract and a $99M Army contract (Reuters via Investing.com).