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- How to Use Gemini to Create Illustrated Storybooks 📖
How to Use Gemini to Create Illustrated Storybooks 📖
Researchers used GPT-6 Astra to boost another AI without any training 🤯
Gina Acosta
November 03, 2026
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
In today’s issue, we share how you can easily create personalized, illustrated storybooks complete with read-aloud narration using Gemini. You can customize stories with original characters, teach children through storytelling, bring their drawings to life, or turn family photos into imaginative adventures.
Let’s jump into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
MIT Researchers Used GPT-6 Astra to Boost Qwen’s Math Skills by Editing Its Weights
OpenAI Expands Its Abu Dhabi Partnerships Across Energy, Government and Investment
AI Tutorial: How to Create Personalized Storybooks With Gemini
AI Tools to check out
AI Findings/Resources
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI News
AI RESEARCH
MIT Researchers Used GPT-6 Astra to Boost Qwen’s Math Skills by Editing Its Weights
Researchers at MIT used OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra to directly modify a small open-source Qwen model, improving its performance on a math benchmark without conventional gradient-based training.
Details:
The approach, called “weight-space programming,” allows an AI model to inspect another neural network’s weights, identify problems and make targeted edits to its parameters.
In the strongest language-model example, Astra’s intervention raised Qwen3.5-0.8B’s MATH-500 score from 7.9% to 48.1% while altering approximately 0.016% of its weights.
The edited model also improved on GSM8K accuracy, going from 13.8% to 67.1%, and on IFEval instruction-following accuracy, increasing from 21% to 62.3%.
The researchers attributed most of the improvement to correcting repetitive reasoning that caused the model to repeat text until it reached its output limit.
However, the same approach failed to produce a mathematical improvement when applied to Gemma 3 270M.
The researchers describe this as a potential new way to debug and improve neural networks. However, the experiment does not establish that direct weight editing is consistently faster or cheaper than conventional training, or that it adds new knowledge to a model. It primarily demonstrated a form of model repair that can help a model make better use of capabilities it already possesses.
TOGETHER WITH ROKU
It's time to set up your holiday streaming campaign
Are you ready to reach holiday shoppers on CTV? For many streamers, the season is already underway.
Last year, according to Roku internal data, holiday content searches on Roku saw an 86% increase during October. And in November, those searches rise an average of 39% weekly. This surging holiday spirit is mirrored by consumer activity, as about half of Roku streamers shopped Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals in 2025.
Meeting those shoppers is easier than you might think. Begin with the seasonal outcome you hope to drive: awareness, online sales, leads, store visits, or another measurable goal. From there, define your audience, upload your creative, set the budget and campaign dates, and establish measurement before launching. You can even create a shoppable ad unit that lets streamers buy with a click of their remote.
Our holiday playbook offers a month-by-month guide to reaching shoppers during this all-important time of year.
First-time spenders get a $5,000 match on the first $5,000 spent with code BEEHIIV5K. Terms apply.
OPENAI
OpenAI Expands Its Abu Dhabi Partnerships Across Energy, Government and Investment
OpenAI has signed a series of agreements with Abu Dhabi-based entities to bring its AI technology into energy operations, government services and investment analysis, as the company also seeks new funding from UAE investors.
Details:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan as the company announced partnerships spanning several sectors.
ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and G42 signed an agreement with OpenAI to deploy its frontier AI technology across ADNOC’s operations.
Sovereign investor Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI agreed to apply advanced AI capabilities to investment analysis.
The Abu Dhabi Government will work with OpenAI on translating government policies and regulations into machine-readable formats.
Inception42 and OpenAI also signed a five-year agreement to support the adoption of advanced AI across government, enterprise and education.
Separately, OpenAI is reportedly seeking to raise up to $20 billion in a new funding round co-led by UAE investors, according to CNBC.
The agreements build on the UAE's growing role in AI investment and infrastructure. Abu Dhabi-based MGX has previously backed both OpenAI and Anthropic, including participating in their major funding rounds.
AI Tutorial
How to Create Personalized Storybooks with Gemini
With Gemini’s “Storybook” feature, you can generate 10-page stories, each with a short paragraph of text that Gemini can read aloud, along with an illustration.
In the prompt bar, ask Gemini to create a storybook about any topic. You can also upload your own photos and files if needed.
Examples:
Teach children through storytelling: “Create a storybook that teaches my 5-year-old the importance of being kind to others. Make the main character an elephant.” or “Create a story that explains the solar system to my 7-year-old.”
Bring their drawings to life: “This is my child’s drawing. Create a storybook that brings the characters and scenes in the drawing to life.”
Turn family photos into adventures: “Use these photos from our family trip to Paris to create a magical adventure story starring my family.”
You can also customize your story by asking Gemini to use specific art styles, such as ones inspired by claymation, anime, comics, and more.
Wait a few seconds for your storybook to be created. Press the Listen button to have the AI read it aloud (you can choose between higher- or lower-pitched voices). You can also share or download your storybook.
*Note: The feature supports over 45 languages and is available globally in the Gemini app on both mobile and desktop.
AI Tools to check out
🗣 Clarity: Real-time noise removal and primary speaker extraction.
🧠 Beacon: Open-source self-improving memory for AI coding agents.
👉 UnleashX: The AI workforce that turns conversations into outcomes.
🌐 Nextbrowser: run browser workflows from your desktop with your AI agent
AI Findings/Resources
😂 People really are using AI for everything, even asking for a shift cover
The latest in AI and Tech
Elon Musk wrote on X that the cost of serving SpaceX’s AI agent was “unsustainably high relative to revenue,” after some users complained that their weekly allowances were running out faster than usual.
The new benchmark is designed to evaluate how effectively AI models help with everyday responsibilities such as finding childcare, managing finances, planning workouts and accessing government services. Developed using time-use datasets and a survey of 3,995 people, it focuses on real-world assistance rather than traditional academic tests.
Claude Code’s system prompt on Opus 5.5 has been updated to steer the coding assistant away from cloning specific existing games, citing concerns over intellectual property infringement. The company says it will continue refining the restrictions to avoid blocking legitimate projects.
The company is adding restrictions to limit the weapons-related information available to teenage users, including when their questions “appear harmless.” The company is also changing how ChatGPT responds to questions about past mass attacks for all users, providing fewer details about the perpetrators, the weapons used and how they were obtained.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻