Powerful AI models that companies can download, run and adapt are becoming a serious competitive force against the closed systems offered by OpenAI and Anthropic. A new wave of open-weight models from China, including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8, has sharpened a debate in Washington and Silicon Valley over whether open models …
Alibaba has released a preview of Qwen3.8 Max, the latest flagship model from its Qwen AI unit. The company says the model ranks among the strongest systems now available and compares with leading frontier models. Bloomberg News reports that Alibaba describes Qwen3.8 Max as second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5. The Hangzhou based company makes …
Google Vids is expanding from an AI assisted presentation tool into a broader video creation service. The new features let eligible users create a digital avatar based on their own appearance and voice. Sarah Perez reports for TechCrunch that Google Vids creates these personal avatars from an uploaded selfie and voice recording. Users can then …
AI-generated books are rapidly expanding Amazon’s catalogue, often with little disclosure to customers and limited evidence of human authorship. Kashmir Hill reports in The New York Times that an AI generated biography of her appeared on Amazon without her knowledge or participation. The 90 page book, titled “The Biography of Kashmir Hill,” mixed public facts …
Anthropic’s coding assistant Claude Code is finding an unexpected audience: people who never write a single line of code. Nolen Jonker writes for XDA Developers that the tool has become their most-used productivity app this year, simply by pointing it at a messy folder of files instead of a codebase. The idea is simple. Jonker …
Elon Musk has reportedly acquired APR Energy, a supplier of mobile gas and diesel power equipment, as his AI company xAI seeks fast ways to supply electricity to its expanding data center operations. Fred Lambert reports for Electrek that the transaction surfaced in a Federal Trade Commission early termination notice, rather than through a public …
PrismML introduces Bonsai 27B, a compressed version of Qwen3.6 27B that the company describes as the first model of its size to run entirely on a smartphone. PrismML announces in an official blog post that the new model shrinks a 27 billion parameter system down to a few gigabytes without abandoning its reasoning, tool use, …
A German research consortium has released Soofi S, an open-source language model trained entirely on Deutsche Telekom’s AI cloud infrastructure in Munich. Jonathan Kemper reports for The Decoder that the 30B model tops benchmarks in both English and German among fully open models, surpassing OLMo 3 32B and Apertus 70B. Efficient by design Soofi S …
Moonshot AI, the Beijing based startup backed by Alibaba, has released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model the company calls in an official blog post the world’s first open 3T-class model. The system combines two new architectural components, Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with a 1 million token context window and native vision …
Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, expanding its research assistant across the company’s AI ecosystem. Josh Woodward announces the change in an official Google blog post, noting that more than 30 million people and over 600,000 organizations already use the tool to summarize documents, prepare onboarding materials or turn notes into audio and video content. …