Top News
Databricks hits $188B valuation: Yes, the data analytics leader remains private, and it’s accepting $3 billion in a fresh fundraising round, let by Coatue Management, at an astronomical $188B valuation. (That’s a 40% jump from its last valuation, which was only in December.) The company designs systems allowing enterprises to safely store and process their data, while building AI applications on top of it. The rush to reduce token costs while opening up more diverse model selections (including open source) has played right into their thesis. A particularly timely new feature — Unity AI Gateway — even helps companies track their spending on various AI models.
Are Fable 5’s guardrails too narrow?: Satya Nadella thinks so. In a meeting with Copilot engineers this week, the Microsoft CEO reportedly argued that Anthropic’s Fable model feels “editorially controlled,” and refuses too many requests that don’t pose immediate national or cyber security threats. “It doesn’t make sense,” he added, according to attendees who provided a copy of his remarks to CNBC. Fable 5, of course, is Anthropic’s attempt to safely release its powerful Mythos 5 model to the general public. (Both models were held back due to its potential for misuse in developing bioweapons, cybersecurity threats, and so forth.) It now appears that the AI lab’s attempts to rein in Mythos may have hurt its everyday usability, opening the door for competitive releases from rival frontier labs along with Chinese open source projects.
Hundreds of Netflix originals were made with AI: In a letter to shareholders alongside its Q2 earnings report, the streamer revealed that about 300 original programs already in its library utilized generative AI at some point in their production process. These include the historical docuseries “The American Experiment” along with a number of international titles. In addition to helping with pre- and post-production tasks, some AI outputs are actually featured on screen. Netflix credits the technology with helping to create “highly complex sequences” such as battles and large-scale crowd scenes that would not have been otherwise feasible to produce. In March, Netflix acquired InterPositive, a startup from founder/filmmaker Ben Affleck that provides content creators with a suite of AI tools.
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Yesterday, Alex reported on Moonshot AI’s latest release, Kimi K3, which was already receiving some positive buzz from the global tech community. Well, the narrative has shifted in the last 24 hours, and the Chinese lab’s latest model — believed to be the largest open source model ever, at 2.8 trillion parameters — now stands as a potential rival for top releases from US closed-source AI labs.
Full model weights won’t arrive until July 27, but leading benchmark portal Arena AI currently ranks Kimi K3 at #1 on its Frontend Code competition, not just above but considerably ahead of Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, and SpaceXAI’s Grok-4.5. Kimi’s ranked #1 in 6 out of 7 domains, including Brand & Marketing, Data & Analytics, Consumer Product, and Content Creation Tools. It drops to second place, behind Fable 5, in just one category: Gaming.
On X, former AI czar (and friend of the pod) David Sacks called the development “concerning,” and cautioned that America risks losing the AI race entirely as states move to further regulate model releases and ban data center projects. National security aside, Kimi K3 also poses a potential threat to massive American closed-source frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. How can they compete, long-term, if Chinese open source labs can replicate their results within months, if not weeks, at considerably lower costs?
The Kimi release was timed to coincide with China’s World AI Conference in Shanghai this week, which received its first appearance from the nation’s president, Xi Jinping. He called for “international cooperation” on AI innovation and safety, noting that these important decisions should not be left up to any single country. – Lon
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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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