Hey Devs! This issue covers Gemma 4, Microsoft’s new models, on-device inference, and updates to coding agents.
Google releases Gemma 4 open models
Google introduced Gemma 4, a suite of open models spanning 2 billion (E2B) and 4 billion (E4B) parameter edge models, as well as larger 26 billion Mixture-of-Experts and 31 billion dense models. The models were designed for advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, and native function calling; they offer multimodal vision and audio support and long 128K-256K-token context windows.
Read more: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/gemma-4/
Microsoft launches MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2 models
Microsoft released three models optimized for productivity: MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech in the top 25 languages with a 2.5× speed improvement over Azure’s previous offering and low word-error rates; MAI-Voice-1 generates realistic speech at 60 seconds of audio per second and allows custom voice creation with a few seconds of input; and MAI-Image-2 generates images quickly with natural lighting, accurate skin tones, and high-quality diagrams.
PrismML introduces Bonsai 8B 1-bit model
PrismML released Bonsai 8B, a 1.15 GB 8-billion-parameter language model that uses 1-bit weights (±1 with a shared scale factor). This design makes Bonsai 8B 14× smaller, 8× faster, and 5× more energy-efficient than full-precision models while maintaining comparable performance.
Read more:
https://prismml.com/
Alibaba’s Qwen 3.6 Plus preview
Qwen 3.6 Plus offers a 1-million-token context window and up to 65K output tokens, enabling the model to process entire codebases and documents. It supports always-on chain-of-thought reasoning, native function calling, and multimodal input, making it suitable for agentic coding and large-scale repository analysis.
Read more: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6
Cursor 3: an agent-centric IDE
Cursor’s blog announced Cursor 3, a new development environment that treats agents as first-class citizens. The Agents Window allows running multiple local or cloud agents across repositories and handing sessions off between environments. A built-in browser lets agents open local websites and a plugin marketplace enables integration with third-party tools.
Read more: https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3
GitHub Copilot CLI 101: The Complete Guide to Every Slash Command
I tested GitHub Copilot CLI’s slash commands. This video shows what they do and when I use them.
Watch on YouTube: GitHub Copilot CLI
See you next week! Cheers, proflead!