The Hallway Track

Meta Connect 2026

open-source wearables multimodal

Dates
2026-09-16 → 2026-09-17
Location
Menlo Park, CA
Ecosystem
frontier lab
Importance
8/10

Official site →

Related coverage & signals

Introducing EmbeddingGemma 2: An open model for natively multimodal embeddings

Google Developers (Google I/O) · Oct 06, 2026

Google releases EmbeddingGemma 2, a sub-billion open model unifying text, image, video, and audio embeddings on-device.

“a picture of a cat, the word cat, and the sound of a cat are all mapped close to each other in a shared high-dimensional embedding space”
The current balance of power in open models

Nathan Lambert · Interconnects · Sep 21, 2026

Chinese open-weight models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have surpassed American ones and reached commercial agentic viability.

“Since about April 2025, Chinese AI companies have been the clear leader in open-weight models.”
Quoting Sam Altman

Sam Altman · Simon Willison · Jul 20, 2026

Leaked Altman email reveals OpenAI planned open-source release to suppress rivals and block their funding.

“We think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded.”
[AINews] Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Omni (NanoBanana for Video), Spark (background agents), and Antigravity 2.0

Latent Space Blog · May 20, 2026

Google I/O 2026 repositioned Gemini as consumer AI surface and developer agent platform with three major launches

“Google used I/O to reposition Gemini as both a consumer AI surface and a developer/agent platform, with three core technical announcements: Gemini 3.5 Flash for fast agentic/coding workloads, Gemini Omni for multimodal generation/editing starting with video, and a broader Antigravity agent stack spanning desktop/CLI”
Don't sleep on wrapture

Simon Willison · Sep 11, 2026

Wrapture is a new indispensable monkey patching package for Python developers.

“This feels like one of those Swiss Army Knife packages that, once mastered, will provide value against all sorts of problems for years to come.”
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days

Simon Willison · Aug 28, 2026

AI coding agents now find security exploits within minutes of patch rumors surfacing publicly

“In the first 10 years of the rclone project we received about 20 security disclosures through GitHub. We had to deal with over 40 in the last month!”
DeepSeek Just Made Closed AI Look Ridiculous

Two Minute Papers · Aug 19, 2026

DeepSeek 4 Pro achieves near-frontier quality with MIT-licensed open weights, pressuring closed AI labs.

“DeepSeek has MIT licensed open weights. Anyone can run the exact same model at their own price.”
Omnigent: Open-Source Meta-Harness for AI Agents | Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia · Databricks · Aug 10, 2026

Databricks CTO launches Omnigen, an open-source meta-harness orchestrating multiple AI agents with shared governance.

“we built this layer that kind of wraps existing agents and lets you easily work with many of them, whether you're composing many agents to solve the same task, or you're trying to control them more centrally”
Run Local Agentic AI Workflows with Meta’s Muse Glimmer on NVIDIA

NVIDIA Developer Blog · Aug 10, 2026

Meta releases Muse Glimmer, a 30B open-weight model delivering 20K tokens/sec on a single GPU for local agentic AI.

“Meta returns to the open source ecosystem with the release of Muse Glimmer, a 30B open-weight dense model with a 120K+ context window built for local AI agentic work.”
Another DeepSeek Moment Has Arrived

Two Minute Papers · Aug 03, 2026

DeepSeek's updated flash model beats its larger pro version via post-training improvements alone

“Just the post-training step changed?”
[AINews] Much ado about Open Weights

Satya Nadella · Latent Space Blog · Jul 28, 2026

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 2.8T MoE beats Opus 4.8, claiming best open-weights model title

“This is more than a model drop; it is a fairly complete recipe for large-scale agentic post-training and serving.”
He Built the World's #1 Open-Source Coding Agent

Y Combinator · Jul 24, 2026

Open-source coding agent OpenCode hit 13M monthly active users with 20x growth in 2026

“We also recently started processing around 7 trillion tokens per day. Uh for context, uh Open Router does a total of around 6 trillion.”
[AINews] not much happened today

Clement Delangue · Latent Space Blog · Jul 21, 2026

US may ban Chinese open-weight AI models as Hugging Face discloses using open models for cyber defense

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?

Simon Willison · Jul 20, 2026

Ben Thompson proposes US law legalizing AI training data collection and distillation to compete with China

“The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum.”
Gemma 4 in Action: Bringing Frontier AI to the Edge

Google Developers (Google I/O) · Jun 29, 2026

Google's Gemma 4 brings frontier-level, multimodal, agentic AI to offline edge and mobile devices.

“The North Star of our smaller models is intelligence per byte of memory footprint.”
Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake

Sam Altman · Interconnects · Jun 19, 2026

Regulating or banning open source AI would be a grave mistake for the US.

“Open source – simply a process that allows technology to be shared, built, and distributed publicly and transparently – is safe, secure, and drives economic growth.”