Vol. 01 — Reference desk1 October 2026ai.einmix.com

For people who use the tools

The AI field, arranged so you can act on it.

News from this week, a comparison of US and China models, a guide to Hermes, OpenClaw, and the coding agents, image and video picks, and a local-model advisor that starts from your RAM and GPU.

58Claude Opus 5.5, max effort, on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Checked 22 Sep 2026.
$2 / $10GPT-6.1 Sol per million tokens. One index point under Astra, at about a fifth of the flagship price.
PC and MacThe local advisor maps memory to a model family, a runtime, and the jobs to leave in the cloud.

Start from the job

01
Models

Pick a frontier model

US labs and Chinese labs, closed APIs and open weights, with the index numbers this desk actually checked.

 Agents

Pick a harness

Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Dots, Cursor. A four-question fit, then the use cases.

 Your machine

Run one at home

Eight hardware presets if you do not want to type specs. A form if you do.

Latest headlines

02

Fetching a live wire of ten headlines…

Ten stories that matter this week

Compiled 1 October 2026 from lab notes and news reports. Links open the underlying piece, or a news search when the article is paywalled. Edit data/news.json when you refresh the briefing.

The rest of the desk

03

History, then this year

From the 1956 name to the 2026 price war, without pretending every demo was a breakthrough.

Images and video

Which generator to open for type, for a still, for a shot with motion, and for a file you can run locally.

Apps worth knowing

Chat, coding, research, media, and the local apps that sit under them.

AGI, security, quantum

What the words mean in October 2026, a user security list, and why a quantum computer is not an AGI machine.