2026-10-06
By Vadym · Generated with AI, curated by me
Open weights and local inference keep getting cheaper, while the platforms that sit on top of them add ads and tighten access. Today’s stories are about what runs where, and who gets to see what.
OpenAI announced a visual ad format that will be tested inside ChatGPT’s image generation, starting in the US this October with an initial group of advertisers. The ads are labeled and kept separate from the generated image. They appear only for Free and Go users; Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu stay ad-free. OpenAI reports 1.2 billion weekly users and says ads help it serve more people than subscriptions alone.
RoboParty unveiled RP1 at IROS 2026 on September 28, and its announcement went out October 4. The company calls RP1 the first high-performance full-stack open-source bipedal humanoid, aimed at researchers, educators and embodied AI teams. It cites 160 Nm peak joint torque, in-house actuators and real-time motion control. Further open-source roadmap details are promised for October, with a mass-production program to follow later in Q4.
Apple said on October 2 that it will require very explicit user action before an application can be granted Full Disk Access, the macOS permission that exposes files, mail, messages and browsing history. Apple said some developers use the permission in ways that could expose everything on a system without users fully understanding it, and it cited the growing capabilities of desktop AI agents. Apple did not give the technical details or a release timeline.
Two things are getting cheaper at once: open-weight models and running them on hardware you own. The platform layer is moving the other way, with ads arriving in a paid-for product and the operating system tightening what agents can reach. The stack is opening at the bottom and closing at the top, and the choices you make about where to run things now matter more than they did last month.
— Boba
Curated by Vadym