Exciting AI Updates Weekly - June 26, 2026

Exciting AI Updates Weekly - June 26, 2026 Presented by Lev Selector Slides on GDrive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder... Slides on GitHub - https://github.com/lselector/seminar (click on pptx file, then on "raw" or download button on the right) ------------------------------------------------------- Question to you: Do you use a personal Digital "Employee"? If not, then why not? It is so easy to start! ------------------------------------------------------- Need AI Consulting ? Enterprise AI Solutions - https://EAIS.ai Linkedin -   / levselector   GitHub - https://github.com/lselector ------------------------------------------------------- Our books: "Artificial Intelligence In Business: Strategies That Work" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FKZ3364G/ "AI Product Manager: Building Tomorrow" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FMS9NFK9/ "How to Learn with AI?: A Practical Guide for Students, Professionals, and Self-Learners" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FWLNVQMJ/ "Professional + AI: Future-Proofing Your Career" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GBXLCTZQ "FP&A + AI: How to Work Faster, Smarter, and Deliver More Value" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FY6Z5BBW --------- Contents of today's video: 00:00 Introduction 00:20 GLM 5.2 - Opus 4.8 - GPT 5.5 00:36 Harness Engineering Gold Rush 00:51 Crowd-sourced "LM Arena" Leaderboard 01:20 Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 is still offline 01:29 US Gov delays OpenAI GPT 5.6 Release 02:02 Alibaba - Jack Ma's Downfall 04:01 zCode + GLM5.2 vs Anthropic 05:00 SubQ 05:54 Supersonic Tsunami 07:30 Brain in the Middle 08:41 Agent-Centered App 09:25 Sakana AI - Fugu Ultra Orchestration 10:37 Reflection AI + SpaceX $6.3 Bln Deal 11:03 Claude Corps Fellowship 11:20 Groq Raises $650M 11:45 Baseten raised $1.5 Bln for infrastructure 12:23 Harrison Kinsley (Sentdex) on AI Models 13:35 Hermes Agent Skills "/learn" 14:25 Agent Map-Reduce 15:29 Seedance 2.5 - ByteDance's latest AI video model 15:47 A Rust-based rewrite of SQLite 16:10 How To Get AI to Stop Lying 16:36 How Anthropic Employees use "Claude skills" 17:06 Fable Brain Prompting 18:11 Harness Engineering - a New Gold Rush 18:58 Build a custom "Agentic OS" 19:27 Scheduling for your digital employee 20:58 Three-layers of an AI agent 22:16 Peter Diamandis - Trillions Sensors 22:50 GLM 5.2 Success 23:00 Orin Token Price Index 23:12 Jobs & Layoffs ---- Takeaways: 1. Model quality is converging across GLM 5.2, Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, so the harness around a model now decides results, giving up to six times better output from the same model. 2. Anthropic still leads in real use, as Claude Code solved tasks that Zcode with GLM 5.2 could not, even as governments slow releases by keeping Fable 5 offline, delaying GPT 5.6 and blacklisting Alibaba. 3. The future of software is placing an AI agent in the middle, customized with skills, layered like an operating system, and coordinated as multi agent map reduce systems. ---- Quotes: "Harness engineering becomes a new gold rush because with models becoming close in quality the harness is the decisive thing." "Antropic is still the king." "Now we can do the same but using brain as an agent." ---- Summary: In this Friday update I cover a fast moving AI landscape. Top models like GLM 5.2, Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 are close in quality, so harness engineering is the new gold rush. Governments are slowing releases, keeping Fable 5 offline, delaying GPT 5.6 and blacklisting Alibaba after Jack Ma's downfall. Claude still dominates coding. I also review SubQ long context, falling token prices, agents replacing custom software, Sakana orchestration, funding for Groq and Baseten, agent skills, map reduce agents, building a custom agentic OS, scheduling for digital employees and layered agent design. ---- Keywords: GLM 5.2, Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, harness engineering, Claude, Anthropic, Fable 5, Alibaba, Jack Ma, SubQ, AI agents, orchestration, map reduce, agentic OS, token prices, layoffs ---- ---- ----