Top News
Kimi K3 is here: After new models from Anthropic and OpenAI (and TWiST500 member Thinking Machines Lab!), China’s AI labs are fighting back. Out today, a new model from Moonshot’s boffins. Kimi K3 is large (2.8 trillion parameters), well-ranked in testing, and available today for about what OpenAI charges for GPT-5.6 Terra, the middle-sized model from its recent family. Thus far, the model has not had its weights released, something that previous Moonshot models have featured; keep your eyes on the lab’s Hugging Face page.
Investors lose patience with Google: Bloomberg reports that Google is “months behind” on delivering Gemini 3.5 Pro, its upcoming flagship AI model. Since the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.5 Flash, Google has fallen behind its rivals and now lags behind several labs, both foreign and domestic. Shareholders are not enthused, with CNBC noting that shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell around 4% on the news, a decline worth nearly $200 billion in market-cap terms.
Uber to buy Delivery Hero: In a deal valued at $14.8 billion, American ride-hailing and food-delivery giant Uber will purchase Delivery Hero. Hero, a German concern, will bring fresh international heft to Uber, which already owned about 25% of the smaller company before the new transaction was announced. Investors in Delivery Hero will earn about €8 more per share in the deal than their equity was worth before it was announced. Shares of Uber are off 10% this year.
TWiST 500
Taking a brief pause from our normal TWiST500 coverage, I want to highlight two news items that I think are instructive:
Gaming company Roblox released “Build, a new mobile-first creation tab within the Roblox app, and a new suite of AI-powered tools within Studio for creators of every level.” In short, the Roblox world can be extended now both at home and on the go. And Roblox has a series of agents (testing, analytics, monetization) coming down the pike.
Food delivery company DoorDash launched ‘DoorDash CLI,’ today, which TechCrunch jokingly says will allow users to “order DoorDash from the command line.” Yep. Your agent can now order food on your behalf.
It’s a ways back now, but recall when there was doubt about what AI could be used for? Agentic chariots are carrying LLMs deep into the world’s product mix, and I expect that these companies are early, not wrong. Agents are also earning access to wallets, and the ability to use human credentials. Just this week, 1Password announced ‘1Password for Claude,’ allowing its users to give their agents “a secure, easy way [to employ users’] credentials without exposing them.”
Now you can OpenClaw your burrito, using password-manager-protected credentials, while coding a new Roblox level without even leaving your couch. Yes, these examples are slightly silly, but soon everything will be agent-responsive, and that means a wealth of tricky issues for startups to solve.
Now we just need a way to summon a Waymo to deliver our CLI’d foodstuff, and we’re golden. The future is incredible. — Alex
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This Week in Startups
E2312: Hustle Fund’s Eric Bahn and Chapter One’s Jeff Morris Jr. join our venture capital roundtable directly following the news that Stripe wants to buy PayPal. The possible transaction highlights how little interest today’s leading startups have in going public any time soon. With host Alex Wilhelm, Bahn and Morris dug into when startups should burn the boats à la Fin, physical AI as the next frontier, the power of Silicon Valley groupthink, and how startups are approaching the first days of widespread, company-specific AI evals!
E2311: Jason’s been talking a lot about his personal vibecoding projects lately, and on this TWiST ep, we finally get a look at what he’s making. PodMeme is a research AI tool that seeks out segments from across different podcasts about any common theme or idea, and then strings these outtakes together into one seamless feed. On TWiST, we get advice on how to promote a product even before it exists from Tweet Hunter and Taplio creator Tibo “Maker” Louis-Lucas, plus the latest news and streaming recommendations.
E2310: Reservoir seeks out AgTech startups that want to revolutionize farming, and invites them to test out their new products on a working farm in Salinas, CA. On TWiST, founder Danny Bernstein tells Jason and Lon about how robots can automate the most difficult jobs (like picking stone fruit in the summer heat), while other innovations can cut down on the use of harmful pesticides or eliminate the need for chemical weed killers entirely. Then, Jason responds to designer Gal Shir’s viral tweet about quitting the industry in the age of AI, and reveals why he bought $100K worth of Figma stock.
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