Friday brought a busy day across artificial intelligence, spanning open-weight model releases, a contrarian macroeconomic verdict on the AI payoff, a radically different speech-only model, a European government tightening its AI guardrails, and fresh unemployment data on the creative economy. Here are the five stories moving the needle.
1. Moonshot AI Unveils Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI rolled out Kimi K3.1 Pro, the first model in its new K3.1 series and what it describes as its most capable 3T-class open-weight model to date, featuring a 1-million-token context window. A companion Kimi K3.1 Pro Highspeed variant delivers 2–3× the inference speed of the base model for latency-sensitive interactions. Both are available today on Kimi.ai, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API, with the full model weights slated to ship by November 4.
K3.1 Pro is a heavily post-trained derivative of the earlier K3 model, built with substantially larger post-training compute and large-scale joint reinforcement learning across hundreds of downstream domains. The lab says the improvements are broad-based. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, which evaluates coding agents on realistic, resource-constrained terminal tasks, K3.1 Pro scores 65.7%—ahead of GPT-6 Astra (58.2%) and narrowly behind Claude Opus 5.5 (66.4%). On its internal Kimi Code Bench 3.0 Long-horizon benchmark it hits 61.2%, up from K3’s 55.95%. In 3D creation, K3.1 Pro reaches 92.7% on BenchCAD with tools, close to Claude Opus 5.5 (96.2%) and GPT-6 Astra (95.9%), and it posts state-of-the-art results on the fiscal-analysis benchmark OfficeQA Pro v2. Moonshot is also shipping 3D Make on kimi.ai, letting users preview, edit, and 3D-print generated models.
2. Apollo: Still No Signs of an AI Payoff Outside Tech
Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok published a Daily Spark note (dated October 24) arguing that, despite massive investment and hype, AI has delivered “zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.” The note cites three charts: revenue per worker is rising for the “Mag 7” but flat for the S&P 493; profit margins are up for the Mag 7 but flat for the S&P 493; and there remain no signs of AI lifting measured productivity growth.
“With no impact on the bottom line, mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins,” Slok writes. He argues that VC-backed firms may spend heavily on tokens, but mainstream businesses “do not need the latest model and are unwilling to pay for it.” The bottom line, he says, is that “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment”—and that the AI story “will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7.”
3. Block’s Dessa: A Conversation Model Trained Only on Speech
Block (the payments and fintech company behind Square and Cash App) unveiled Dessa, a full-duplex speech-to-speech model that, by its own account, was trained from scratch on nothing but human conversation—no text and no pretrained models. “As far as we know, Dessa is the world’s first AI you can have a realistic live conversation with that was trained only from human speech,” the announcement says.
Dessa is full-duplex, listening and talking simultaneously, and understands when to interject and when to backchannel. It natively hears and renders emotion, sarcasm, laughter, and a frustrated sigh—information that is thrown away when speech is flattened into text. Inference runs faster than real time and the model runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. Notably, Block says Dessa learned language from “hundreds of times fewer words” than text-based LLMs and was trained on only a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system. The team frames the project around curiosity, richer human–AI understanding, and safety. A recorded demo even has Dessa conversing directly with OpenAI’s GPT-Live-1 in an AI-to-AI exchange.
4. Swedish Government Offices Move to Ban ChatGPT and Claude
Sweden’s Regeringskansliet—the Government Offices, a specific central agency rather than the whole of the Swedish state—is informing staff it will discontinue unregulated use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, reported by Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio. The move is framed as an information-security measure: unvetted AI services with no contract in place can carry “consequences for our information security.”
Context matters here. The restriction targets personal accounts and free plans on unsanctioned services, while some staff will retain access to a dedicated in-house AI platform the Government Offices built themselves, through which ChatGPT and Claude remain reachable. Notably, Microsoft Copilot remains an approved tool, a choice several observers linked to existing Microsoft/Office contracting. The move follows a Swedish Transport Administration internal audit earlier this year that reportedly found widespread and risky use of around ten different AI services, including sensitive data being entered into open tools. HN commenters broadly read the decision as IT asserting control over how data moves in and out, rather than an outright anti-AI stance.
5. AI and the “Fall” of the Creative Class
Economist Joseph Politano, writing for Apricitas Economics, digs into new data showing the United States has lost more than 200,000 jobs in creative industries over the last four years—roughly 50,000 of them in the past year—one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern U.S. history, rivaling the 2001 and 2008 recessions. Unlike those downturns, this period lacks a generalized recession and instead coincides with the rise of AI systems able to compose novels, generate photorealistic images, and produce soundalike music at near-zero cost.
The clearest signature of AI’s influence, Politano argues, is that “all subsectors of the digital arts industry are losing jobs, while in-person entertainment is still growing at a healthy pace.” Movie and sound recording have been hit hardest: Hollywood is down more than 100,000 jobs, nearly a third of the sector, with employment hitting lows not seen since the 2008 recession and approaching 30-year depths. Written publishing has shed over 70,000 jobs. Politano cautions that proving exactly how much of the decline is attributable to AI is difficult, since media firms hide their AI use both to avoid public backlash and to protect the legal basis for their copyrights. He draws a parallel to the Napster era: just as the industry won its lawsuits but lost the war to the internet, so too may the arts need to rethink its business model in an age of abundant, near-free synthetic content.
That’s the state of AI for Friday, October 25, 2026—from open-weight models climbing the coding and 3D benchmarks, to the persistent debate over where the economic payoff actually lands, to a speech-only model, tightening government guardrails, and the pressure on creative workers.
