Six AI stories from this week, checked against the sources

A carousel from the Instagram page Evolving AI has been doing the rounds in our WhatsApp groups this week. It promises "the biggest AI news you have missed." We took six of its stories and traced each one back to the original reporting before writing a word. Three held up as described. Two needed context the slides left out. One claim we couldn't confirm at all. Here's each one, with what it means for people building businesses and creative work in Tanzania.

“A year ago that took a developer, or a spreadsheet and a free afternoon.”

GPT-6 is now in free ChatGPT This one is accurate. OpenAI rolled GPT-6 out to paying ChatGPT subscribers on 7 October and to Free and Go accounts on 8 October, according to BetaNews. The bigger change is how answers look. OpenAI calls it Intelligent UI. When a question suits it, ChatGPT can reply with a chart, a form, a clickable diagram or a small working tool, like a savings calculator or a bill-splitter. Simple questions still get plain text. It works in the browser and the current mobile apps but not in older desktop clients, and OpenAI admits the model's design sense still needs work. In practice, a shop owner in Kariakoo with a free account can now ask for a quick loan repayment calculator and get one that works, right there in the chat. A year ago that took a developer, or a spreadsheet and a free afternoon.

A free Adobe suite built with Claude, in early alpha The slide says one developer is rebuilding Adobe's entire Creative Suite with Claude. He says so too. The software is further behind than the headline suggests. The project is ArtCraft, by Brandon Thomas, who has about 15 years in the industry. He has released seven free, open-source apps written in Rust: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere Pro), LightCraft (Lightroom), EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign) and a PDF tool listed as both PrintCraft and PdfCraft (Acrobat). They run on Windows, macOS and Linux, with some versions in the browser. TweakTown reports that he built them with Anthropic's Claude and declared "software is over." His own roadmap puts PhotoCraft at roughly 25 to 35 percent of what a professional uses every day. Early users report trouble with basic edits, keyboard shortcuts and speed, and there's no Content-Aware Fill yet. He first promised full feature parity within a month, then revised that to 99 percent "within months." We design for clients every week, so we have mixed feelings about this one. Adobe's subscription is priced for American and European budgets, and it's a real cost for freelancers and design students here. A free, legal alternative would matter more in Dar es Salaam than in most places. We still wouldn't put a client project on alpha software. Whether ArtCraft ever gets past alpha is the thing we most want to know.

Isomorphic Labs and a $40 billion bet on AI drug design Mostly accurate. Bloomberg reported on 8 October that Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind and led by Demis Hassabis, is in talks to raise money at a valuation of at least $40 billion. One person told Bloomberg it could reach $50 billion, and that the terms could still change (RuntimeWire). The company raised $2.1 billion about five months before that. "Solve every disease" is Hassabis's long-stated hope for AI. The company hasn't done it. Its real test is getting AI-designed drugs through clinical trials, and none of the reports we read said those trials have begun.

REA, a tool that lets AI study software from the outside Accurate, and the one we'll be watching most closely. REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is a free, MIT-licensed tool that plugs into AI coding agents through the Model Context Protocol. It lets an agent inspect software it has no source code for: desktop programs, Electron apps, Android APKs, websites, .NET files and more. The agent gets back pseudocode, maps of how the program's parts connect and network logs, each tied to the evidence behind it. The repository, morluto/rea on GitHub, passed 115,000 stars after about a week of trending, Apidog reports. The project's README limits use to lawful research and makes the user responsible for permission. Copying a competitor's feature raises the same legal questions it did before this tool existed. REA also runs with your own computer's permissions, so open any untrusted file on an isolated machine. For developers here, the good use is learning how a well-built app solves the problem you're stuck on. The tempting use is cloning a competitor. We'd stay well away from that one.

Old games in the browser, and a viral shooter we couldn't verify The browser games slide is a screenshot of an 8 October post on X by the account Radiant Optimizer. It links to Black Ops Zombies, Halo CE, Skate 3, Modern Warfare 2, GTA Vice City and a dozen more. These are fan-made ports and web builds, not official releases, and we couldn't confirm the licensing behind each one. The post itself tells readers to skip any site that asks them to download a launcher. Good advice: if it won't run in the tab, close the tab. The Hood Warfare slide is where the carousel got it wrong. It calls the game "vibe coded," meaning built mostly by prompting an AI. We read the coverage on Dexerto, GAMES.GG and HotNewHipHop, and none of it mentions AI. What we did find: Hood Warfare 2, from Trapstar Games, launched on Steam on 8 October for about $5 and went viral for how closely it copies Call of Duty's multiplayer. It has also been criticised as racist, for turning real gun violence in Chicago into jokes and stereotypes. The slide calls that "exaggerated street humor." We wouldn't.

What we're taking from this week Two of these stories touch our work directly. Once people get used to interactive answers in ChatGPT, they'll expect the same from a business website or a WhatsApp bot: a calculator, a booking form, something to tap. And if ArtCraft matures, it could take a real cost out of creative work in East Africa. One question we can't answer yet. If anyone can rebuild Photoshop with an AI model, and copy an app's features with a tool like REA, what stays hard to copy? Our guess is knowing the client and the place. We'd like to hear yours.