The Pulse – what changed in AI · 21.10.2026

OpenAI: GPT-6.1 Sol passes 86.6% of COBOL migrations at low effort

On OpenAI's own COBOL-migration eval (hidden tests must all pass), GPT-6.1 Sol scores 86.6% at low reasoning effort versus 5.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol, at 39% lower cost, and 97.9% at high effort. OpenAI is also publishing its MultiLangBench test suite on GitHub.

Source: Advancing coding in low-resource programming languages · 2026-10-19

Inception releases Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM with a 1M-token context

Inception says Mercury 3 generates about 1,068 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs, with context up from 260K to 1M tokens, at $0.20 / $0.70 per million input/output tokens (50% off at launch). It is OpenAI-API compatible and on OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel; quality claims are the vendor's own.

Source: Diffusion at Scale: Introducing Mercury 3 · 2026-10-19

DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, the engine behind its production serving

DeepInfer is released under Apache 2.0 and targets DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on NVIDIA SM100 GPUs and Huawei Ascend 950 NPUs. The open-source version covers offline inference only.

Source: deepseek-ai/DeepInfer on GitHub · 2026-10-20

Notion's sixth-generation agent harness runs single tasks for up to 24 hours

Tasks used to stop after five minutes; each session now runs on a queue-backed worker loop that survives restarts, compacts long context and can check actions with a second model. New credits: 1,500 Standard and 500 Select per Business/Enterprise seat, with existing customers moving over on November 2.

Source: Agents, rebuilt to do more for less. · 2026-10-19

Claude Code 2.1.305: check your MCP allowlist after upgrading

allowedMcpServers no longer filters managed-mcp.json stdio servers that use ${VAR} only in env, so a server you left out may now load; use deniedMcpServers to block it. The release also fixes the 2.1.304 regression that broke every request behind gateways that reject tool search, and adds an opt-in Linux sandbox setting for nested user namespaces that the changelog warns weakens file protections.

Source: Claude Code changelog: 2.1.305 · 2026-10-20

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