# AI news, Friday, 16 October 2026

Compiled by Richard Brooks's AI news desk. Canonical: https://richard-brooks.com/ai-news/2026-10-16/

## Ant Group inclusionAI open-sources Ling-3.1-flash 560B MoE under MIT

Models. 25B active parameters and a 1M-token context after the API trial. Day-0 SGLang support makes a large long-context agent model runnable for builders who want open weights.

Source: inclusionAI / Ant Group, https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI/Ling-3.1-flash

## Google Research opens Deep Review for public document verification

Agents. Agentic review that checked more than 16,000 conference papers now covers legal, finance and technical PDFs. Two free reviews a week, with Gemini API access for higher volume.

Source: Google Research, https://research.google/blog/analyzing-technical-documents-with-deep-review/

## MBZUAI and Inception42 release Jais 3 open Arabic models and Jais Speech

Language. 6 open models from 900M to 375B parameters plus speech recognition for dialects across 19 Arab countries, keeping English or French words when speakers switch. Follows the Falcon-Emirati and Falcon-ASR releases earlier in October.

Source: Institute of Foundation Models (MBZUAI), https://ifm.ai/jais3/press-release/

## NVIDIA releases Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, an open 120B multimodal model for agents

Models. Reads text, images, documents and video with tool use, and is built to be post-trained on company data. Ships with open datasets, including a 2.8T-token corpus in 22 Indian languages.

Source: NVIDIA Technical Blog, https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-nemotron-3-5-super-vl-powers-specialized-agents-with-multimodal-reasoning/

## StepFun opens weights for Step 5 Preview, a 600B agentic model with 1M context

Models. 27B active parameters, served through vLLM or SGLang, under a licence with commercial conditions. Follows the September API launch, so firms can now run it on their own hardware.

Source: StepFun (Hugging Face), https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/Step-5-Preview

## xAI launches Grok Voice 3.0 speech-to-speech at $0.08 a minute

Language. Tops Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index at 86.9 and already runs Tesla and Starlink voice traffic. Same price as Voice 2.0, with grok-voice-latest users upgraded automatically.

Source: xAI, https://x.ai/news/grok-voice-3