Apple's new M6 MacBook Pro runs AI up to 25% faster than M5, and pre-orders open today

The M6 has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU. Each has two more cores than before. Apple says AI tasks like prompt processing run up to 25% faster than M5. It says the Neural Engine is up to 1.9 times faster than M5's. Against an M1 MacBook Pro, Apple claims up to 13 times faster prompt processing. Memory goes up to 32GB. All of these figures come from Apple's own tests. The laptop starts at $1,999 in the US and arrives from Friday, November 6.

• Nvidia will put $3 billion into Meta's stock sale. Nvidia says it will invest $3 billion in Meta's equity offering. The two are expanding work on Meta's Muse models. Meta plans to deploy more Vera Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs. Nvidia announced it on October 26.
• Nvidia's next chips are now on general sale in Oracle's cloud. Nvidia says its Vera Rubin NVL72 systems and Vera CPUs are now generally available on Oracle's cloud. Each rack links 72 GPUs. They plan to grow these clusters to multi-gigawatt scale. No date or cost was given. Nvidia says OpenAI is among early users of the Vera CPUs there.
• A judge blocks a Pentagon lobbying rule aimed at Alibaba. A federal judge in San Jose has barred the Pentagon from enforcing a lobbying rule against Alibaba. The rule bars defense contracts with firms sharing a lobbyist with a "Chinese military company". Judge Eumi K. Lee granted a preliminary injunction on October 26, in force until further order. It covers that rule only, not Alibaba's listing by the Pentagon.
• Baidu gives away a small model that reads very long documents. Baidu released Unlimited OCR 2 on October 27, a free 3.3 billion-parameter model under the MIT licence. Baidu says it turns documents of any length into text within a fixed memory window. It reports top scores on tests of documents up to hundreds of pages. Those are its own results.