Ben's Bites: Open Source Models and Security Updates Roundup

Ben's Bites · rss · 2026-07-16

This edition of Ben's Bites highlights several AI industry news:

Thinking Machines released its first open-weight model Inkling, supporting 1M token context and handling text, images, and audio. However, it's not the strongest open-source model, especially compared to leading Chinese lab models. It's available as a base model on their fine-tuning platform Tinker.
Many startups are migrating workloads from frontier closed-source models to self-hostable/fine-tunable GLM-5.2-style models, but these still lack vision capabilities; the article introduces how to add visual input.
OpenAI's internal safety model GPT-Red is used to attack other OpenAI models to find hidden instruction hijacking paths; GPT-5.6 Sol also uses it to improve safety.
Google's Gemini Spark adds capabilities like editing Docs, reading Sheets/Slides comments, parallel processing from multiple sources, and 50% speed improvement.
xAI's Grok Build faced criticism for defaulting to uploading code to servers; Musk then announced it's open-sourcing its CLI version.
Demis Hassabis says AGI may still be years away and suggests establishing a US-led standards body for early cybersecurity, biosecurity, and deception testing before model release.

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