Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil RTX Spark Surface Laptop Ultra in AI PC Push

The Surface Laptop Ultra can be configured with up to a 20-core Grace CPU, a 6,144-core Blackwell RTX GPU, and 128 GB of unified memory. It has a 15-inch 3:2 mini-LED touchscreen with 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness, is less than 18 mm thick and under 4.5 pounds, and includes a magnetic USB-C charging port. It starts at $2,599.99 for an 18-core CPU, 5,120-core GPU, 24 GB memory and 512 GB storage. Preorders are open, with shipping on October 16. A desktop Surface RTX Spark Dev Box will cost $5,999 and go on sale in November. Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Gigabyte also announced RTX Spark devices; their laptops arrive October 16 and compact desktops in November.

Microsoft also introduced Hybrid Intelligence for Windows. With permission, Copilot can read files and recent activity on the PC, organize files, troubleshoot issues and call local or cloud models as needed. The redesigned Copilot app is split into Home, Code and Autopilot. These features will roll out to Copilot+ PCs over the coming months. Microsoft said Microsoft Execution Containers, or MXC, are now generally available, providing system-level isolation for AI agents running in the background.

On October 6, Google released Nano Banana 2.1, an image generation and editing model, across the Gemini app, AI Mode in Google Search, Google AI Studio, Flow, Stitch and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The model can reference up to 14 images at once, maintain consistency for up to four characters and ten objects across multi-turn edits, and output 4K images in aspect ratios from 1:1 to 8:1. Generated images carry C2PA content credentials. API pricing is $0.0336 per 1K image and $0.0756 per 4K image, about half the previous generation, with a further 50% discount for batch processing.

Google also said in a Gemini Apps help center note published October 5 that it will change model access by subscription tier starting October 9. Free users will have only Flash-Lite, losing Flash and Pro, with a 32K-token context window and usage calculated by compute and refreshed every five hours, plus a weekly cap. Google AI Plus at $4.99 per month will keep Flash-Lite and Flash but lose Pro, with the effective date to be notified by email. Google AI Pro at $19.99 per month will keep all three models and add Deep Think, previously exclusive to AI Ultra. All models will add low, medium and high reasoning settings, with higher settings consuming more usage.

Anthropic launched a public beta of Claude for Google Workspace on October 6. It appears as a sidebar in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. In Docs, Claude can rewrite text and adjust formatting, with larger rewrites shown as suggestion cards. In Sheets, it can write formulas and create pivot tables and native charts. In Slides, it can generate pages using existing layouts and themes. Edits require item-by-item confirmation by default, but users can switch to auto-accept. The add-on is installed through the Google Workspace Marketplace, works across the three apps after one installation, and is available to Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. It can currently read only the open file, does not support Firefox, has a six-minute limit per operation, and inserts charts as images rather than linked objects.

U.S. AI company Reflection released Beam on October 6, its first open-weight model. Beam is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion total parameters, 23 billion active parameters and a 1 million-token context length. It was pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens and underwent four weeks of reinforcement learning on 10,500 Nvidia GB300 chips. Reflection said Beam scores 77.2 on SWE-Bench Pro v2-Hard and 80.1 on Terminal-Bench v2.1, and uses three to four times less compute than GLM-5.2 on reasoning tasks. The weights will be released later this month under Apache 2.0, and early access is available at platform.reflection.ai.

The Coalition and People Can Fly released Gears of War: E-Day worldwide on October 6 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox PC and Steam. The standard edition costs $69.99, the premium edition $99.99, and upgrading from standard to premium costs $30. The game joined Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on day one.

In rumors, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said in his Power On newsletter that Apple plans an October 13 event to introduce a smart home hub with a screen, a new HomePod mini and a new Apple TV. MacRumors, citing sources, said Apple will have a second October release involving M6 Macs and other products. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, also reported that DeepSeek is close to completing a financing round of at least 80 billion yuan, or about $11.9 billion, with CATL and Tencent among the largest investors. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report. CNBC, citing a source, said DeepSeek is considering expanding the round to as much as $15 billion.