Today in AI — 2026-07-16

Top AI stories of the day, ranked by source authority + keyword signal. Auto-curated from 27 trusted sources.

1. [AINews] Thinky's Inkling: 975B-A41B multimodal, new best American Apache 2.0 open model (with Inkling-Small, 276B-A12B)

Source: Latent Space Podcast · Signal: 80 ·

Thinky's first full LLM release is a banger and bonus: it's open weights!

2. Inkling: Our open-weights model

Source: Simon Willison Blog · Signal: 71 ·

3. Why teens deserve access to safe AI

Source: OpenAI Blog · Signal: 70 ·

Learn how OpenAI is making ChatGPT safer for teens with age-appropriate protections, learning tools, parental controls, and expert partnerships.

4. How Cars24 scales conversations and builds faster with OpenAI

Source: OpenAI Blog · Signal: 68 ·

Cars24 uses OpenAI-powered voice and chat agents to handle 1M+ monthly conversation minutes, recover 12% of lost leads, and bring agentic workflows to teams across the company.

5. Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)

Source: Simon Willison Blog · Signal: 65 ·

6. Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)

Source: Simon Willison Blog · Signal: 64 ·

7. 🔬 The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center — Andy Beam & Rafa Gómez-Bombarelli, Lila Sciences

Source: Latent Space Podcast · Signal: 62 ·

Lila is betting that science, not the internet, is the last untapped source of training data. We went to find out what that actually looks like in a room full of robots.

8. Open Source, Free Tier Capable Whispr Using Cloudflare AI

Source: Hacker News - AI · Signal: 62 ·

Article URL: https://github.com/PrestigePvP/Voicebox Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48929870 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

9. Connect more of your apps to Search

Source: Google AI Blog · Signal: 60 ·

You’ll be able to securely link and interact with your go-to services directly in AI Mode.

10. Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates

Source: Google AI Blog · Signal: 60 ·

Gemini Omni and personal avatars in Google Vids make video creation easier than ever.

11. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Embed Ranks #1 Overall on RTEB, Advancing Agentic Retrieval

Source: Hugging Face Blog · Signal: 58 ·

12. Newer Models, Same Advantage

Source: Hugging Face Blog · Signal: 58 ·