The Monday AI Update ·
What happened in AI this week
The AI news, translated for hot girls.
Happy Monday, gorgeous.
The robots had a busy week. Here's what actually matters for your business — minus the keynote buzzwords.
Prices
OpenAI just halved the price of its everyday workhorse
On October 26, OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast model built for the computer work that fills a workday — reading what's on screen, filling out forms, entering invoices into accounting software. Its standard API price is $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, 50% lower than the model it replaces. Your take: if anything in your business runs on repeat, the same budget now stretches roughly twice as far. Before you pay for the fanciest model, check which one your workflows actually ride on.
Agents
Agents now start 4 in 10 pull requests on GitHub
GitHub's Octoverse report, published October 28, found that by September more than 40% of pull requests started with an agent's first draft — up from 17% in March, or about 110 million agent-started pull requests in a single month. Your take: the first draft is increasingly an agent's job, and review is where the human adds the taste. That's exactly how to run it in your business too: let the agent draft, you direct and approve. Delegation, but make it glamorous.
Open
Mistral's biggest model is now free to download
On October 29, Mistral published the open weights of Large 4 — its 1-trillion-parameter flagship, nicknamed Le Chonk — so anyone can download it, adapt it, and run it on their own servers. If self-hosting sounds like a server room you don't own, the API is the easy on-ramp at $0.70 per million input tokens. Your take: frontier-grade AI you can actually own, not just rent. For a small business, that means private, customizable systems without a gatekeeper's monthly permission slip.
Security
Google's strongest model goes to the defenders first — not to you (yet)
On October 28, Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, its strongest model yet, built for cybersecurity and long, multi-step engineering work — it tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59. But first access goes only to a subset of vetted cyber defenders, with no date yet for developers, businesses, or the rest of us. Your take: the labs are racing on security, and the shiniest model always arrives gated. Don't wait on a headline you can't use — build on the boring, reliable model you can actually open today.
See you in the room,
Courtney