A Gemini that acts, Meta’s new models, and inflation runs hot

Meta introduced Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full on October 12, calling them its most capable models to date for personal and professional agentic tasks. Muse Wonder is available now for developers through the Meta Model API and Muse Code, and Muse Wonder Full is available to Muse Code subscribers. The models add Active Memory, which carries what matters to you across conversations, and Active Focus, which keeps working toward a goal, recovers from errors, and checks in before acting on anything important. Meta names tasks like handling an insurance claim, understanding a lease, making sense of finances and building a working app.

Nvidia said on October 13 it will commit $250 million over five years, about $50 million a year in compute, to agentic safety and security research in the United Kingdom. Most goes to the wider UK research community, with a share to a new lab led by the University of Oxford, one led by University College London, and Imperial College London. The work focuses on keeping agents that act on their own secure, including secure sandboxes and safety benchmarks. Chief executive Jensen Huang said "AI capability and safety must advance together."

The consumer price index rose 3.7% in September from a year earlier, above the 3.6% economists polled by Dow Jones expected. Prices rose 0.6% from August, in line with forecasts. Core inflation, which leaves out food and energy, rose 2.6% over the year, above the 2.5% expected. CNBC said the reading renewed worries about persistent inflation.

Bank of America shares fell about 3% on October 14 after third-quarter earnings of 91 cents a share, which CNBC noted may not compare cleanly with a $1.10 forecast, on revenue of $30.0 billion against $30.69 billion expected. The report came a day after regulators hit the bank with more than $1.2 billion in federal penalties, saying it failed for years to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, over $1 billion of it tied to national security risks.

ASML, which makes the machines used to build advanced chips, reported third-quarter net profit of 4.96 billion euros on October 14, above the 4.1 billion euros analysts expected, though net sales of 11.66 billion euros fell just short of the 11.72 billion euros forecast. The company said some customers are expressing interest in placing orders into 2029 and 2030, and chief executive Christophe Fouquet tied the demand to their views on the size and duration of AI investment. Its shares rose about 2.6%.