Good day . Google handed its new Gemini model to a few cyber defenders before anyone else, and Apple finally let you touch a Mac. Also today: GitHub’s agents now start 40% of pull requests, Bloomberg gives quants a coding assistant that asks permission first, and an Anthropic manager retires the coding interview.
Google Gives Gemini 4 Carbon to Defenders First 9to5Google
What happened: Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, October 28, two weeks after it launched Argon, calling it its next frontier model with “significant gains across coding and agentic tasks,” 9to5Google reports. It goes to a subset of cyber defenders first, with developers, businesses and consumers to follow.
Why it matters: The model is good at the offensive side of security too. Google’s numbers: 88.2% on a vulnerability-finding test, 54.8% on exploitation and 71.0% on patching. So the first access program, called Fairwind, comes with conditions, per Unite.AI: security teams only, phishing-resistant multi-factor login, and no reselling.
What everyone’s saying: Google’s pitch is leaderboard-shaped: first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59, and up 89 Elo points to fourth on WebDev Arena. Intro pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, rising to $4 and $20 later, 9to5Google says.
My read between the lines: Staged access for the scary skill is becoming the industry move. Anthropic did it in April, and Google says it is also working with the US government’s voluntary pre-release testing process. Note the price: the intro rate doubles, so the teaser is the rate you get while the model is still a rumor.
📖 Further reading: Anthropic built the most powerful AI ever. You can’t use it. — Handing a cyber-capable model to defenders first is the pattern Anthropic set with Mythos and Project Glasswing, and I wrote up what the access gap means for the rest of us.
GitHub says agents now start 40% of pull requests, so your Thursday could use a few of its own. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, then does the work: reports, dashboards, code and campaigns. Think coworker, not chatbot. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →
Apple Puts a Touchscreen on the Mac CNBC
What happened: Apple announced the MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR Display, its first Mac with a touchscreen, powered by M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, CNBC reports. The 14-inch starts at $2,899, the 16-inch at $3,399, and it ships November 6. “For the very first time,” said CEO John Ternus, “we are bringing touch to the Mac.”
Why it matters: Apple spent years refusing touch on laptops. The AI angle is the memory. 9to5Mac lists up to 128GB of unified memory, and CNBC says Apple is pitching its chips as the best place to run AI on the device instead of in the cloud. In May we covered The Mac Mini Sold Out Because of You, and this is the sequel.
What everyone’s saying: CNBC says Apple teamed up with Meta to show large models running on clusters of Macs wired together at high speed, so developers can run agentic code without paying Anthropic or OpenAI. Meta’s model team bought hundreds of Mac Minis this year to test agents. IDC’s Ryan Reith was less excited about touch itself: Windows laptops have had it for ages, he said, and it is “just another feature, not a selling point.”
My read between the lines: The touchscreen is the headline and the cluster is the story. A laptop line that scales to 128GB of memory, plus a way to chain Macs together, is Apple’s offer to the people who now pay by the token. Reith’s line is the tell: he says the draw is developers, not shoppers who want to poke a screen.
📖 Further reading: Your Mac Just Became a $20/Month AI Employee — If the Mac is where agents are headed, this is the guide to putting an AI employee to work on one.
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GitHub: Agents Now Start 40% of PRs The Next Web
What happened: At GitHub Universe on Wednesday, GitHub launched Copilot Fusion, a system that picks which AI model, or mix of models, handles each step of a coding task, The Next Web reports. By September, more than 40% of pull requests began with a draft from an agent, up from 17% in March.
Why it matters: A pull request is a proposed code change that a person reviews before it goes live. Agents now write the first draft of a big share of them. DevOps.com says GitHub also made Copilot Projects generally available, a tool for tracking many agents working in parallel, plus a deeper code review option called Max.
What everyone’s saying: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted that “we’re redefining the SDLC for the agentic era,” and said Fusion delivers frontier-level quality 40% faster at up to 77% lower cost. Enterprise customers can now use every Copilot feature without a separate subscription, paying for the AI credits they use instead, per The Next Web.
My read between the lines: Billing by usage instead of by seat puts a meter on the work, which sits oddly beside yesterday’s Amazon guidance calling token counts a flawed scoreboard. Also, “started by an agent” is not “merged.” The reviewer at the end of that conveyor is still a person, and DevOps.com says GitHub is moving to a multi-region Azure setup by early 2027 to keep up with all the traffic.
Bloomberg’s Coding Assistant Asks Before It Runs Bloomberg
What happened: Bloomberg introduced BQuant Assistant, a conversational AI coding assistant built into BQuant, its Python environment for finance, Bloomberg says. You type a question in plain language and it writes Python and queries in Bloomberg’s own query language, BQL, for data across equities, fixed income, FX, commodities and more than 22,000 fields.
Why it matters: It does not just suggest code. Subject to your approval, it inserts the code into your project and runs it in BQuant’s secure sandbox, and it asks before it reads from or writes to a notebook. It is generally available in BQuant Enterprise, with a limited beta in BQuant Desktop at the end of October.
What everyone’s saying: Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards framed it as speed: investors have bigger, messier datasets, and turning an idea into repeatable analysis still takes specialized coding skill. The company says it helps everyone from a portfolio manager sketching a first query to a quant building a multi-asset signal.
My read between the lines: The approval step is the product. In finance, the assistant may write the query but a human presses the button, which is the same trade Claude Code just loosened for deleting files. The release also never names which AI model is underneath. The pitch is Bloomberg’s data, not anyone’s brain, and that is a choice.
Anthropic Manager Retires the Coding Interview The Next Web
What happened: Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic engineering manager who has led engineering for Claude.ai, Claude Code Desktop and Cowork, wrote on Tuesday, October 27 that he is dropping coding interviews for his team, The Next Web reports. His comparison: there is no more point in giving someone a little React challenge than in quizzing them about assembly, because Claude is now better at both.
Why it matters: He says those small challenges were a weak but useful predictor of success, and his most impactful builders now succeed whatever they score on them. “Hunger beats tenure,” he wrote, noting newer engineers are flying past people who are probably better coders. Yesterday’s Brief had Goldman linking AI use to weaker hiring; this is the hiring side of the same shift.
What everyone’s saying: The Next Web places it in a wider scramble. Google is expanding pilots of engineering interviews that let candidates use Gemini, and Amazon warned its engineers against chasing AI usage metrics. Anthropic has said Claude writes 80% of its own code.
My read between the lines: Notice what he did not announce: a replacement. He says he has not worked out how to interview for people who build well with AI, and for now he scans résumés and portfolios for small prototypes that show taste, empathy and principled thinking. That is an honest answer and a hard one, because taste is much harder to grade than a coding challenge.
That’s your AI Brief for Thursday.
—Nicholas from Artificially Intimidating
