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Yesterday, Meta launched its new Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full AI models to compete directly with industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. This release follows a major corporate overhaul and massive investments led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to close the gap in the artificial intelligence race. The models will power Meta's personal AI agent and coding tools, helping the company build new subscription revenue streams.

Last week, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, a model designed to provide high-speed, affordable support for everyday tasks like customer service and coding. The model features significantly lower pricing and a massive context window of one million tokens. With this release, Anthropic has completed the release of version 5.5 of its trio of Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models.

OpenAI has released 722 manuscripts on GitHub containing solutions and progress toward 372 major mathematical problems, generated using an unreleased ChatGPT pioneer model. This release includes significant claims including a solution to the four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, a key open question in fractal geometry and steps toward the Riemann hypothesis, mostly produced through single-agent “one-shot” prompts requiring about three hours of compute time each. If verified, this marks a significant turning point where advanced AI autonomously solves complex mathematical problems, though it also intensifies scientific friction, skepticism, and controversy over whether tech giants can bypass traditional peer-review processes.

Lean TECHniques works alongside Midwest companies to leverage technology for business impact. Through advisory, coaching, and embedded delivery, Lean TECHniques helps organizations develop high-performing teams, create environments that fuel innovation, and deliver best-in-class customer experiences. Core areas of expertise include software, cloud, artificial intelligence, product management, and technology leadership.

Google announced the Gemini agent at Gemini at Work 2026 (Oct. 8) as a single “universal agent for work” that answers questions, handles knowledge work, generates images and media, and writes and runs code from one prompt box, with the pitch that you hand it an outcome rather than step-by-step instructions. It runs in the cloud, so it keeps one set of memories and context across web, mobile, desktop, Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Slack, and long tasks keep going after you close your laptop. It can spin up temporary sub-agents for multi-step jobs, or create “coworker agents” with their own email address, calendar and Drive that teammates can @mention like any colleague.

We’re getting in the Halloween spirit over here are Profs headquarters.

We’ve been huge fans of Claude Artifacts for years. Artifacts is where we went to build websites, interactive games, documents and more. But Artifacts are changing. Claude now offers templates for Docs, Slides and Design in Artifacts. Everything saves to a new Artifacts tab, exports to Word, PowerPoint, PDF or Google Docs and Slides, and on paid plans can connect to apps like Slack and store data without being published first. Artifacts made before Sept. 16 still work, but you can’t make new ones the old way.

New Artifacts include Dashboards and Motion. Dashboards connects to company data and builds charts that update live. Motion turns a report or chart into a short animation built from code, so every word and number stays editable.

Shadow AI: When employees use AI tools at work without their employer knowing or approving it, like pasting a client email into a free chatbot to draft a reply, or uploading a spreadsheet to an AI app to summarize it. It’s the AI version of “shadow IT,” the long-standing habit of staff signing up for software on their own because the official tools are slower or don’t exist.

The use of shadow AI happens for understandable reasons. The tools are free or cheap, they’re easily accessible, and they genuinely save time, so people use them without thinking of their use as a policy question. The risk is that anything typed into a tool that hasn’t been vetted may be stored, reviewed, or used for training, depending on the service and the plan. That, in turn, can mean confidential client details or internal documents leaving the building without anyone realizing it. The fix is rarely a blanket ban, which tends to push the usage further underground. More often, it’s offering approved tools, writing a short and clear policy, and making it easy for employees to ask what tool use is acceptable.

Miss out on any previous AI terms of the week? Check out our Glossary of AI terms, where we’re collecting all entries in the series. And if you want us to define a term in an upcoming newsletter, let us know!

The Innovation Profs are Drake University Professors Chris Porter and Chris Snider. Porter leads Drake’s Artificial Intelligence major and Snider is a multimedia professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.