Chinese startup DeepSeek releases upgraded AI model

L'Oreal has announced a wide-ranging collaboration with OpenAI, unveiled at VivaTech 2026, that brings Maybelline's virtual makeup try-on directly into ChatGPT via L'Oreal's ModiFace AR technology. The deal spans consumer shopping tools, product discovery for brands like Lancome and Kerastase, advertising pilots (SkinCeuticals, CeraVe, Garnier), and R&D - including using OpenAI's GPT-Rosalind life-sciences model for skin-microbiome research. It lands as OpenAI reports ChatGPT at more than 900 million weekly users.

Sakana AI has launched Fugu and Fugu Ultra, a multi-agent orchestration system delivered as a single foundation model - Fugu is itself an LLM trained to route tasks across a swappable pool of the world's best models (and recursively to itself) via one OpenAI-compatible API. Sakana says Fugu Ultra matches frontier models like Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos Preview on demanding engineering, science, and reasoning benchmarks, while pitching the approach as an AI-sovereignty hedge: if one provider's access disappears, as with Anthropic's recently export-controlled models, Fugu reroutes around it. It is generally available today through subscription and pay-as-you-go tiers.

HSBC has signed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to build and deploy AI across wealth management, financial-crime risk, and internal decision support, using Gemini models and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The bank expects more than 200 AI use cases over two years, with selected ones each potentially returning over US$100 million. It builds on a deep existing base - 600-plus AI use cases and a Google-built financial-crime system screening 1.2 billion transactions a month.