Grok 4 Fast: Xai's distilled, 40% more token efficient, 2m context, 344 tok/s frontier model

**xAI** announced **Grok 4 Fast**, a highly efficient model running at **344 tokens/second**, offering reasoning and nonreasoning modes and free trials on major platforms. **Meta** showcased its neural band and Ray-Ban Display with a live demo that experienced hiccups but sparked discussion on live hardware demos and integration challenges. **Meta** is also developing a first-party "Horizon Engine" for AI rendering and released Quest-native Gaussian Splatting capture tech. New model releases include **Mistral's Magistral 1.2**, a compact multimodal vision-language model with improved benchmarks and local deployment; **Moondream 3**, a 9B-parameter MoE VLM focused on efficient visual reasoning; **IBM's Granite-Docling-258M**, a document VLM for layout-faithful PDF to HTML/Markdown conversion; and **ByteDance's SAIL-VL2**, a vision-language foundation model excelling at multimodal understanding and reasoning at 2B and 8B parameter scales.