All tags
Person: "_catwu"
xAI raises $20B Series E at ~$230B valuation
grok-5 claude-code xai nvidia cisco fidelity valor-equity-partners qatar-investment-authority mgx stepstone-group baron-capital-group hugging-face amd ai-infrastructure supercomputing robotics ai-hardware agentic-ai context-management token-optimization local-ai-assistants aakash_gupta fei-fei_li lisa_su clementdelangue thom_wolf saradu omarsar0 yuchenj_uw _catwu cursor_ai
xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, completed a massive $20 billion Series E funding round, valuing it at about $230 billion with investors like Nvidia, Cisco Investments, and others. The funds will support AI infrastructure expansion including Colossus I and II supercomputers and training Grok 5, leveraging data from X's 600 million monthly active users. At CES 2026, the focus was on "AI everywhere" with a strong emphasis on AI-first hardware and integration between NVIDIA and Hugging Face's LeRobot for robotics development. The Reachy Mini robot is gaining traction as a consumer robotics platform. In software, Claude Code is emerging as a popular local/private coding assistant, with new UI features in Claude Desktop and innovations like Cursor's dynamic context reducing token usage by nearly 47% in multi-MCP setups. "The 600 million MAU figure in xAI’s announcement combines X platform users with Grok users. That’s a clever framing choice."
Mistral 3: Mistral Large 3 + Ministral 3B/8B/14B open weights models
mistral-large-3 ministral-3 clara-7b-instruct gen-4.5 claude-code mistral-ai anthropic apple runway moondream sparse-moe multimodality benchmarking open-source model-licensing model-performance long-context inference-optimization instruction-following local-inference code-generation model-integration anjney_midha _akhaliq alexalbert__ _catwu mikeyk
Mistral has launched the Mistral 3 family including Ministral 3 models (3B/8B/14B) and Mistral Large 3, a sparse MoE model with 675B total parameters and 256k context window, all under an Apache 2.0 open license. Early benchmarks rank Mistral Large 3 at #6 among open models with strong coding performance. The launch includes broad ecosystem support such as vLLM, llama.cpp, Ollama, and LM Studio integrations. Meanwhile, Anthropic acquired the open-source Bun runtime to accelerate Claude Code, which reportedly reached a $1B run-rate in ~6 months. Anthropic also announced discounted Claude plans for nonprofits and shared insights on AI's impact on work internally.
DeepSeek V3.1: 840B token continued pretrain, beating Claude 4 Sonnet at 11% of its cost
deepseek-v3.1 seed-oss-36b computerrl gemini-2.5-pro gpt-5 claude-code gpt-oss-120b gpt-oss-20b deepseek bytedance zhipu-ai github microsoft anthropic together-ai baseten huggingface token-efficiency coding agentic-benchmarks long-context reinforcement-learning developer-tools fine-tuning multinode-training model-release teortaxestex rasbt lukehoban burkeholland _catwu cline winglian
DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.1, a quietly rolled out open model with an 128K context window and improvements in token efficiency, coding, and agentic benchmarks. ByteDance launched the permissive Seed-OSS 36B model on Hugging Face, noted for long-context and reasoning capabilities. Zhipu AI introduced ComputerRL, a reinforcement learning framework for computer-use agents, achieving strong benchmark results. In developer tooling, GitHub Copilot expanded globally, Microsoft VS Code integrated Gemini 2.5 Pro and updated GPT-5 agent prompts, and Anthropic launched Claude Code seats with spend controls. Open-source fine-tuning advances include Together AI adding SFT for gpt-oss-120B/20B and Baseten enabling multinode 120B training with Truss CLI. The community noted mixed performance and ongoing post-training adjustments for DeepSeek V3.1.
not much happened today
gpt-5 gpt-oss-120b opus-4.1 sonnet-4 openai anthropic minimax context-windows model-routing model-hosting multi-tool-pipelines prompt-caching model-extraction model-pairing cost-efficiency model-optimization sama jeremyphoward jxmnop _catwu
OpenAI continues small updates to GPT-5, introducing "Auto/Fast/Thinking" modes with 196k token context, 3,000 messages/week, and dynamic routing to cheaper models for cost efficiency. The MiniMax AI Agent Challenge offers $150,000 in prizes for AI agent development by August 25. The community discusses GPT-OSS-120B base model extraction, hosting, and tooling improvements, including multi-tool pipelines and flex-attention. Anthropic announces model pairing in Claude Code with Opus 4.1 for planning and Sonnet 4 for execution, expanding context to 1M tokens and introducing prompt caching. Key figures include @sama, @jeremyphoward, @jxmnop, and @_catwu.