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The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it has received the first part of Blue Energy's phased construction permit application for a single BWRX-300 reactor at the Port of Victoria, Texas, including a request for limited early work. It is an application, not an approval. Here is what the notice says and what happens next.

JetBrains has released Mellum2.1, a small open model for coding agents, and Hugging Face has released Carbon-A, a 1.2B-parameter model that predicts protein-coding regions in DNA, plus a database of 566 million predicted loci. What each does, and which numbers are the developers' own.

Three AI-agent start-ups announced funding on 8 October: Hone ($60M seed), Vesta ($30M, reported) and Catalyst ($30M seed, reported). Crossmint launched a toolkit that lets AI agents pay by card. What each company says, who reported what, and which figures are company claims.

Neutron is Rocket Lab's reusable medium-lift rocket, built to carry up to 13,000 kg to low Earth orbit. It has not flown. Rocket Lab's own August filing says the window for a launch this year "is narrowing". What the rocket is, how it is designed, and where it stands.

Hugging Face's FineEnvs team has released an open framework that turns unmodified coding-agent harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode into reinforcement-learning environments. In its own tests, one small model scored 62% in one harness and 33% in another. What a harness is, how the training works, and what the results do and do not show.

The IMF says tokenised assets are about $65bn and pose limited systemic risk today, but 24/7 trading and automatic liquidations could spread stress faster. Korea plans a tokenised government bond pilot. Spiko raises $90m for tokenised cash funds, OSL tokenises a professional-only stablecoin strategy fund, and Stove's share tokens reach UniswapX.

Samsung's third-quarter guidance points to about ₩107.4 trillion in operating profit on ₩195 trillion of sales, up from ₩12.17 trillion a year ago, with AI data-centre memory demand credited. AWS becomes a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation, with a board seat. What the numbers say and what they leave out.

Manus raises more than $500m after Beijing blocked Meta's takeover. Tab emerges at a $300m valuation. Nvidia reportedly discusses another $1bn for Figure. ElevenLabs says it has passed a $600m run rate, and Synthesia launches Syren. A Reuters/Ipsos poll finds most Americans think government is not taking AI risks seriously enough.

A new benchmark, TasteVal, says the best AI model now reaches expert-level results on eight AI research tasks with 2.3 times less compute, though its authors list reasons that may overstate progress. Preference Model has open-sourced Karotte, a framework for training environments that are harder to game, and DatologyAI has released Zephon, a data loader that keeps experiments repeatable when the GPU count changes. What each claims, and who measured it.

Scale AI and Elorian's Humanity's Sixth Sense benchmark finds people score 93.1% on everyday visual questions while the best model, GPT-6 Astra, scores 53.6%, mostly because models misread the picture. A separate preprint, not yet peer reviewed, says base models can reason almost as well as RL-trained ones when their answer starts with the right word.