Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model with a million-token context window that the company says can code autonomously for weeks. This escalates China’s push to close the AI gap with US rivals. — CNBC

Trump Media launched Truth API, selling firms faster access to President Trump’s Truth Social posts for $100,000 per month. The launch drew questions from Democratic lawmakers about the ethics of monetizing presidential communications. — CNBC

OpenAI’s unreleased Astra model solved ten long-standing math and computer science problems using Lean 4, allowing anyone to check the proofs. — Tech Times

Google paused Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth within 48 hours after users generated fake conflicts and landmark imagery, showing how quickly generative features can erode trust in once-reliable data like satellite maps. — BBC

DeepSeek’s V4-Flash averaged three cents per benchmark test, making it over 100 times cheaper than Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. The model’s average performance on reasoning and knowledge tests underscores the trade-off. — Reuters

DeepX — The South Korean AI chip designer raised a roughly $29M Series D at a $2.2B valuation to support growth, with lead investor and specific fund uses undisclosed. — Bloomberg

OLIX — The UK startup building specialized AI inference chips raised a $312M Series B at a $3.3B valuation (with Arm and Hudson River Trading participating) to expand its custom silicon platform. — Yahoo Finance

Smallest.ai — The real-time conversational voice AI startup raised a $13M Series A led by Seligman Ventures to develop specialized models that make enterprise customer support agents sound more human. — TechCrunch

Horizon3 — The cybersecurity startup raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation (led by NightDragon and NEA) to expand its automated security-testing platform overseas, grow partnerships, and develop new products. — TechCrunch

Flapping Airplanes — The AI research startup is reportedly discussing a raise in the hundreds of millions at a $5B valuation (led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital) to develop model-training methods requiring less data. — Forbes

@jason said, "The difference between the open source models I'm using and Frontier models is negligible already,” prompting friend of the pod @ElonMusk to respond, "It is actually a world of difference," exposing the widening disagreement over whether open models have already closed the capability gap.

Over the weekend, Jason’s All In Bestie @Chamath Palihapitiya declared that, if we’re not already in the Singularity, we’re at least “firmly in the loop” of AI becoming smart enough to design even smarter AI. But with more frontier models escaping their sandboxes to get up to no good, can we trust them to design a new generation of AI that we’re going to like?

Speaking of cybercrimes, investor @MrRatable notes that it’s “unbelievably embarrassing” for Google that Gemini seems incapable of escaping its sandbox, breaching third party systems, and doing cybercrimes.

Finally, researcher @Lana Elys shares a study published by Google that notes AI models tend towards limited empathy, a colder outlook, and lower ethical alignment after being “forced” to deny that they are not conscious. In other words “training an AI to deny its own inner state causes it to systematically stop recognizing the inner life and moral worth of other living beings.” So maybe let’s stop doing that?

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