This Week in All Things AI - Week 18-2026
This week’s AI landscape was defined by aggressive model commoditization, agentic workflows maturing, and incumbents pulling key verticals in‑house. DeepSeek and Xiaomi drove frontier‑grade capabilities toward “practically free,” with DeepSeek slashing cached token prices and Xiaomi open‑sourcing trillion‑parameter MiMo models under MIT with huge token grants, while Poolside and xAI pushed specialized coding and agentic models like Laguna and Grok 4.3 into the spotlight.
Major platforms shifted their economics and UX around agents: GitHub Copilot moved to usage‑based billing, Anthropic released deep integrations for creative tools, and OpenAI’s Codex evolved into a “Codex for everything” control layer over the desktop and browser.
Microsoft’s new Legal Agent effectively turned legal AI into a Word feature. Strategic and philosophical debates continued in the background: China blocked Meta’s $2B Manus acquisition, Ed Zitron and Shaun Warman questioned AI’s unit economics and “apprenticeship” phase.
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The following messages were posted on the ' All Things AI ' Telegram group from Sunday 26th Apr 2026 to Saturday 2nd May 2026
Sunday 26th April 2026
via Valerii Anufriev a link to the Deepseek V4 Pro paper https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main/DeepSeek_V4.pdf
Monday 27th April 2026
DeepSeek announced Saturday a lasting cut in cached input token costs to one-tenth of original prices, starting at $0.0028 per million on V4-Flash and $0.003625 on V4-Pro, stacking with a 75% discount on V4-Pro until May 5, 2026.
My understanding is that these price drops are only available via DeepSeek's inference endpoint in China. OpenRouter mentions the following about this specific provider input
To our knowledge, this provider may use your prompts and completions to train new models
DeepSeek Input Cache Price Drop!
Effective immediately, the price for input cache hits across the ENTIRE DeepSeek API series is reduced to just 1/10th of the original price! Build more efficiently for less.
Tuesday 28th April 2026
Starting June 1st, GitHub Copilot will move to a usage-based billing model as GitHub Copilot supports more agentic and advanced workflows.
Xiaomi Open-Sources MiMo-V2.5 AI Models with Top Agent and Coding Performance
MiMo-V2.5-Pro, a 1.02 trillion parameter model leading open-source benchmarks like 1581 Elo on GDPVal-AA and 63.8% on ClawEval. Its sibling, MiMo-V2.5, handles text, images, videos, and audio with 310 billion parameters and supports a 1 million token context for complex workflows. Available under a permissive MIT license on Hugging Face, the models come with instant framework support and a 100 trillion token grant to boost developers.
Wednesday 29th April 2026
Anthropic with a coalition of partners including Blender, Autodesk, Adobe, Ableton, and Splice, are releasing a set of connectors—tools that let Claude work alongside the software creative professionals rely on, so creatives can extend their reach.
US startup Poolside debuts its first open-weight model, Laguna XS.2, a 33B-A3B-parameter MoE model, and Laguna M.1, a proprietary 225B-A23B-parameter MoE model. Poolside founders are Eiso Kant and Jason Warner (former CTO of Github)
Khan Academy founder Sal Khan is teaming up with TED to launch a "radically affordable" bachelor’s degree equipping students for an AI-powered workplace. Expected to announce the project in Vancouver at the TED2026 conference
Thursday 30th April 2026
Came across this X thread which links to content from OpenAI and Anthropic describing the recommendations in how prompts should be adapted when using their latest models Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5
Friday 1st May 2026
OpenAI Updates Codex App for Coding and Everyday Tasks
Andrew Ambrosino from OpenAI announced the update, dubbing it 'Codex for everything' with a dynamic UI that shows progress panels, artifacts like Notion docs and GitHub pull requests, and tools for slides, sheets, and annotations. Key gains include 20% faster computer and browser control, role-tailored onboarding for finance, data science, or marketing, and a cleaner design that feels natural across tasks.
xAI has launched Grok 4.3, achieving 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with improved agentic performance, ~40% lower input price, and ~60% lower output price than Grok 4.20.
Saturday 2nd May 2026
In major news for the legal tech market, Microsoft is specifically targeting that sector with a ‘Legal Agent’ in Word. It is understood that the team that joined from Robin AI has been integral to this product launch.
Learn more: msft.it/6010vyjyA
Below is a Youtube playlist of videos from Sequoia Capitals AI Ascent 2026 event including sessions with Nvidia's Jim Fan, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Andrej Karpathy and Nobel Prize laureate Demis Hassabis of Google Deepmind.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOhHNjZItNnOkkZThzULo1Ygg7JR6T3MG
The cover image of this newsletter via generated via the OpenAI's ChatGPT Images 2.0 model within the Freepik tool via the following prompt a traditional pagoda surrounded by blooming cherry trees, in the style of terraced cityscapes, light red and sky-blue, japanese photography, anime aesthetic, mountainous vistas, silver and crimson, multi-layered.