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AI news today, 18 October 2026
3 AI stories that matter, explained in plain words, each linked to its source.
- 18 Oct 2026
- 3 stories
- in the news
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DeepSeek
DeepSeek's free model update chases Claude on coding
What happened
DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017 with open weights; it scores 77.0 on the DeepSWE coding test, by its own numbers.
Why it matters to you
A free, cheap model now competes with top paid coding AIs.
Sources
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Meta
Meta pulls web-scraping line from its business terms
What happened
Meta removed wording that let it use content from business accounts' websites to train products. It says crawling is unchanged.
Why it matters to you
Publishers feared their sites could train Meta's AI.
Sources
Related on our site
Reflection AI
Reflection Beam: open coding model arrives on AWS
What happened
Apache 2.0 weights, 501B total and 23B active parameters, 1M-token context by Reflection's own figure.
Why it matters to you
A free-to-download coding model now runs on Amazon's cloud.