AI DAILY / DEV
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THURSDAY
August 13, 2026
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    xAI Ships Grok 4.6, Ties GPT-5.6 Sol on the Intelligence Index at $2/$6
    • New xAI flagship released August 12, aimed at long-running agentic and coding work.
    • Scores 61 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index — level with GPT-5.6 Sol Max, one point behind Fable 5 Max, five points above Grok 4.5.
    • 500K context window; pricing stays flat at $2 input / $6 output per million tokens.
    • Day-zero availability in Cursor, Grok Build, OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare AI Gateway; Cursor and Grok Build are giving bonus usage the first week.
    models x.ai

    Google Puts Gemini Intelligence in the Pixel 11 OS to Book Rides and Order Groceries
    • Made by Google 2026 keynote on August 12 launched the Pixel 11 lineup starting at $899, all running Tensor G6 on TSMC's 2nm process.
    • Gemini Intelligence adds agentic multi-step task completion across 40+ third-party apps — Gemini can order groceries, book rides, manage reservations, and dial businesses on your behalf.
    • Same day, Google opened Gemini connectors to Granola, Otter.ai, Wix, Zocdoc, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, and seven more partners.
    • Reviewers frame it as the biggest repositioning of Pixel since launch — 'Google has singlehandedly raised the bar for AI on your phone.'
    industry techcrunch.com

    Paper Steals Encrypted Chain-of-Thought Across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google APIs
    • arXiv 2608.09867, posted August 10 by MATS Research, ELLIS Tübingen, and Max Planck: encrypted reasoning blocks aren't bound to a session, user, or model.
    • Attack replays a strong model's reasoning trace into a weaker sibling from the same provider and asks it to transcribe — verbatim CoT falls out.
    • Sweep of 6,708 public agent logs pulled 62 live API keys, 33 passwords, and 704 privacy artifacts hidden inside 'encrypted' blocks developers had already published.
    • HN discussion active; Simon Willison flagged the same shared-key smell in May but nobody chased it to a full exploit.
    research arxiv.org

    DeepMind's SL2T Ships Sign-Language-to-Text on the Pixel 11's Camera
    • First shipping phone feature that translates sign language: SL2T reads ASL from the front camera and dictates into Gboard, Live Transcribe, and Gemini queries.
    • Trained on 100,000+ hours of signing across 50 sign languages, with roughly a quarter of the data in ASL.
    • Ships alongside a new AI Sign Language Advisory Committee that includes the National Association of the Deaf, World Federation of the Deaf, and RIT's NTID.
    • Debuts on Pixel 11 today; DeepMind hasn't committed to non-Pixel Android or iOS availability.
    research deepmind.google

    Lovable Doubles to a $13.3B Valuation With $400M Series C as ARR Triples to ~$600M
    • Menlo Ventures and the EQT Scaleup Europe Fund co-led the round announced August 12; Tencent and Balderton joined, along with new backers from Europe, LatAm, and Asia.
    • ARR has climbed from ~$200M in December to a run-rate tracking toward $600M by the end of August, per CEO Anton Osika.
    • Enterprise customer list now includes Nvidia, Adidas, Hearst, and Zendesk — the vibe-coding wedge is landing outside prosumer.
    • Valuation double December's $6.6B round places Lovable ahead of Cursor's last public mark on ARR growth, if not headline valuation.
    industry techcrunch.com