Meta and Google Both Ship New Models, OpenAI's Astra Raises Safety Monitoring Concerns
Today we're covering the biggest AI stories of September 3rd, 2026. Meta and Google both shipped new models within hours of each other, with Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 hitting a 62 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index, trailing only Claude Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 while costing far less, and Mark Zuckerberg already teasing a larger model codenamed Watermelon, while Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash landed at 59 with real gains in coding and reasoning, though DeepMind's own Koray Kavukcuoglu admitted Gemini still sits a little below the frontier. A new report claims OpenAI's upcoming Astra model uses a…
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