Posts tagged “retail-automation”

• Inkling-Small, GPT-5.6 Price Cuts, and Open-Weight Parity: What AI's Latest Wave Means for Cannabis Operators

  July 30, 2026

  This week's AI developments deliver a cascade of cost reductions, capability expansions, and infrastructure maturation directly relevant to vertically-integrated cannabis operators. Thinking Machines' Inkling-Small brings efficient multimodal reasoning with a massive context window. OpenAI slashed GPT-5.6 prices by up to 80%. Open-weight models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3 have reached accuracy parity with proprietary models on regulatory and clinical tasks—at roughly one-third the cost. Gemini Robotics ER 2 and the Gemini Live API push real-time automation and conversational interfaces forward. Meanwhile, new open-source inference engines, agent behavior standards, and enterprise deployment frameworks signal that AI is moving from experimentation to production—and that cannabis operators with compliance-heavy, multi-site operations have fresh tools to reduce costs and improve patient outcomes.