Hi tech & AI enthusiasts, this week's highlights:
China's Kimi K2 Just Beat GPT-5 at Its Own Game
Gemini Now Builds Entire Presentations for You
Google's Planning to Run AI in Space
The Lab: How to Create Presentations With Gemini Canvas
AI Image of the Week: 80s Retro VR
Let’s get into it.
▲ AI MODELS
Humanity's Last Exam (Text-only) w/ tools
Moonshot AI released Kimi K2 Thinking, an open-source reasoning model that outperforms GPT-5 and Claude 4.5 Sonnet on key benchmarks whilst costing under five million dollars to train.
What you need to know
Beats the frontrunners on reasoning: K2 scored 44.9% on Humanity's Last Exam (with tools), beating GPT-5's 41.7% and Claude's 32%. It also leads on BrowseComp with 60.2% against GPT-5's 54.9%.
Handles complex workflows autonomously: The model chains together 200 to 300 tool calls on its own to complete tasks. It also matches GPT-5 on coding and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.
Dramatically cheaper to build and use: Training cost under five million dollars, and pricing comes in significantly below current frontier models. It's fully open-source under a Modified MIT License.
Key Ideas
▲ Jensen Huang said China is 'nanoseconds' behind in AI. This proves it. Kimi K2 shows you don't need massive budgets to compete with the frontier. When open-source models can match or beat the best closed ones at a fraction of the cost, the AI landscape shifts for everyone.
▲ AI PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS
Generating presentations is available on Gemini web
Google introduced presentation creation in Gemini Canvas. Just type 'create a presentation' with a topic or upload source materials, and Gemini generates a complete slide deck with theme and images.
What you need to know
Works from text or files: Describe your topic or upload a sales brief, project notes, or lesson plan. Gemini creates themed slides with relevant visuals automatically.
Export to Google Slides: Send your presentation straight to Google Slides to refine, collaborate, or present. You get a working deck you can edit like any other presentation.
Rolling out to millions: Available on Gemini web and mobile for Google Workspace customers (Business, Enterprise, Education, Nonprofits) and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Full rollout completes by November 12th.
Key Idea
▲ Presentation software has always made you start with a blank canvas. Now you start with a complete deck based on your idea or documents. This cuts the hardest part: staring at an empty slide wondering where to begin.
▲ AI INFRASTRUCTURE
AI Image - Grok
Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, a research project exploring solar satellites equipped with AI chips for running machine learning workloads in orbit.
What you need to know
No limits: Solar panels in the right orbit produce power up to eight times more efficiently than on Earth and work nearly continuously. This sidesteps electricity costs and power grid constraints.
Radiation-hardened chips: Google's Cloud TPUs survived proton beam tests equivalent to five years in space with no hard failures. They're planning a 2027 trial with two satellites through partner company Planet.
Projected cost parity: Launch costs could drop to under two hundred dollars per kilogram by the mid-2030s, potentially making orbital infrastructure competitive with terrestrial data centre energy expenses.
Key Idea
▲ The AI boom has already pushed data centres to their limits on Earth. If Google can make this work, space infrastructure unlocks unlimited solar power without grid restrictions or community opposition. It sounds like science fiction, but they're testing hardware and launching prototypes in two years.
▲ EVEN MORE NEWS
Other big ideas from the past week.
XPENG Next-Gen IRON
▲ Iron humanoid robot: XPENG unveiled Iron, a humanoid robot with bionic hands and touch-sensitive skin that walks so convincingly people thought it was a human in disguise. Mass production starts by the end of 2026. Video here.
▲ OpenAI's AWS deal: OpenAI signed a 38 billion dollar cloud agreement with Amazon Web Services for hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs. The deal extends through 2027 and beyond, marking OpenAI's first major partnership outside Microsoft.
▲ Microsoft's image model: Microsoft launched MAI-Image-1, its first in-house image generation model. It's now available in Bing Image Creator and Copilot, debuting in the top ten on LMArena benchmarks.
The Lab
▲ AI EDUCATION
Gemini Canvas creates complete presentation decks from a simple prompt or uploaded files, handling everything from theme selection to relevant images.
What you'll learn:
How to generate presentations from text prompts or source documents
How to refine and customise your slides with follow-up prompts
How to export to Google Slides for final editing and collaboration
Use cases for sales pitches, lesson plans, and project proposals
🔬 Interested in learning about AI for business? Join The Lab waitlist.
▲ AI IMAGE SHOWCASE
Create this type of image with Midjourney
--sref 3441414479
Laptop Vr headset and mobile phone floating in the air in a studio with a seamless background and studio lighting. --sref 3441414479Image Usage Suggestion: Tech advertising, email newsletters/banners, social media graphics, business pitches
💌 Reply to this email with your AI image generation or suggestion of what you’d like to see and I'll feature it in a future newsletter.
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Thanks for reading — until next time.
Stay curious,
Matt Lok, Editor
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