My radar picked up 14 “new” AI launches this week, and 4 of them weren’t new at all.
Sites in ChatGPT is in beta since July. Grok Bot came out in August, Claude Projects changed on 17 September and MiniMax H3 is from July. All four were going around my feed as this week’s news, some of them with pretty big numbers, so I stopped trusting the feed and went through every launch on the company’s own page instead.
What was left were 10 real launches. And to be honest, the thing that surprised me most is that half of them are about the same thing, which is your ads.
New here? Grab a coffee, you’re in the right place. Been here a while? Thanks for sticking around.
If someone on your team runs paid social and didn’t have time to follow the news this week, send them this.
Before we start
For each launch you get what it does, who can use it, what it costs and what I would do with it for a client. Everything is checked against the company’s own launch post.
A lot of it is US first. I’m in Slovenia, so where something is not available in Europe I say so, because it changes what you can actually do this week.
Higgsfield Ads Studio
This one I’d try first.
Higgsfield launched it on 1 October and pushed it hard on Instagram on the 5th. You give it your website once, it pulls in your logo, colours, fonts, tone of voice, audience and selling points, and that becomes your brand kit (you can also fill it in by hand). Then it makes static ads for one product, up to 20 in one run, and every one is built on a different selling angle.
It costs 4 credits per ad, which is about $0.20. So 20 ads, let’s say around $4.
It’s only static images, for video they send you to their Marketing Studio. You can also run it inside ChatGPT with the Higgsfield extension.
I wouldn’t use it for final creative. I would use it to find angles, basically run 20, see which 3 you’d never think of yourself, and then make those properly with the team.
Meta Muse for small business
On 29 September Meta gave Muse, their AI agent, a set of skills for businesses.
It can now read your Instagram professional analytics, your Facebook Page and your Meta ad accounts, and it connects to Shopify, Klaviyo, Stripe, QuickBooks, Notion, Slack, Canva, Figma and a dozen more. So you can ask it what’s working and it drafts next week’s posts and ads from that. Canva also added a Muse connector the same day, which makes designs from your brand assets.
Meta says it’s “free for most of what people need”, with paid plans for more, but there are no prices yet. They also say nothing gets published, sent or spent without your approval, which is good because this one sits right next to your ad budget.
The catch is that it’s US and Canada only, in the Muse app. So for me in Slovenia, not yet.
TikTok
TikTok announced a whole bundle at Advertising Week in New York on 5 October. Some of it is live, some of it is “coming”, so be careful which part you read.
What’s live for US advertisers is the TikTok Ad Network, which shows your ads in nearly 400,000 other apps and runs from the same Ads Manager you already use. Search ads now run on Smart+, so it picks keywords and creative for you, and Smart+ Creative Selection puts your own assets, TikTok’s AI creatives and creator content in one approval flow.
The part I find most interesting is actually the TikTok for Business MCP, which is now a connector in Claude, Perplexity, Replit, Manus and Snowflake. In normal words, you can ask Claude about your TikTok campaigns. TikTok says advertisers using it grew more than 200% from July to September.
Buy Direct (checkout inside TikTok), a Shopping Assistant and a Lead Agent for DMs and lead forms are all announced without a date. I wouldn’t plan anything around those yet.
ChatGPT ads
OpenAI posted an ads update on 5 October and it has two parts.
First is tracking. You can now send conversion data through Hightouch, Tealium and LiveRamp, and see results in AppsFlyer, Triple Whale, Northbeam and others. For incrementality tests there’s Haus, Measured and WorkMagic, and DoubleVerify and IAS are piloting brand safety.
They shared partner numbers too. WeightWatchers paid 15.3% less per acquisition than their paid search benchmark, and 93% of Portland Leather’s visitors from these ads were new to the brand.
Second is a new image ad format that shows up while someone is generating an image in ChatGPT, labelled and kept separate from their picture. Testing starts in the US later this month with a first group of advertisers.
This one I’d watch, not jump in. Ads only show to Free and Go users, and only in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and there’s no public price or minimum spend yet. But ChatGPT has 1.2 billion people a week, so of course I’m keeping an eye on it.
HyperFrames Studio
Not an ads launch, but probably the one I’ll use the most myself.
HeyGen launched it on 5 October. It’s a free desktop video editor where Claude Code or Codex builds the video and you direct it, so you change things by asking and not by dragging clips around on a timeline. It’s open source, it runs on Mac and Linux (Windows is “coming soon”), it has 57,500 stars on GitHub and it installs as a Claude Code plugin.
I already make my reels in code with a setup I built myself, so this is the one I’m curious to put next to it. For motion graphics and product intros I’d try it first.
GPT-6.1 Sol
OpenAI released it on 29 September. They say it gets close to GPT-6 Astra for about a fifth of the price.
It’s in ChatGPT Work and Codex on Plus and above, not in regular chat, which confused a lot of people this week. It’s also rolling out starting with Pro, so maybe you don’t have it yet.
On the API it’s $2 per million tokens in and $10 out, Astra is $10 and $50. We use Astra mostly for the hard image, video and coding stuff because it’s the expensive one, so if you’re hitting limits in Work mode on long jobs, Sol is what I would try first.
The 4 I’d skip for now
Gemini 4 Argon launched on 30 September and the benchmarks look strong, but right now only a small group of cyber defenders can use it. Paid API customers and Google AI Ultra are next, no date. So bookmark it and come back.
The Figma MCP drama went viral on 30 September, when someone from Figma confirmed that only approved tools can connect to their MCP server. It’s like that since April, and Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT and Codex are all on the list, so if that’s what you use, nothing changes. Only thing to know is that writing to the canvas is free in the beta and Figma says it will be paid later.
Midjourney’s 2 October update is mostly bug fixes on the alpha site. Collaboration tools are coming next week, I’d wait for those.
Reflection’s Beam is a huge open model from 5 October, made for coding and agents, weights later in October. Great for developers, nothing for your marketing this week.
If you have one hour
I would go in this order. Run Higgsfield Ads Studio on one product, 20 ads for about $4, and keep the 3 angles you didn’t expect. If you’re in the US or Canada, connect Muse to your Instagram and ad account, read-only first, and ask it what’s working. If you advertise on TikTok in the US, open the Ad Network and Smart+ Search in Ads Manager. If you’re on ChatGPT Work, switch your next long job to Sol. And if you use Claude Code, install HyperFrames Studio and try one 15-second product intro.
ChatGPT’s image ads I’d just put in the calendar for later this month.
If someone on your team runs paid social and didn’t have time to follow the news this week, send them this.
See you next week.
Aljaz