The Price of 'Open': China's Free AI Models Start Sending Bills
Alibaba plans to charge the biggest commercial users of its next Qwen model a share of their revenue, copying a template set by Moonshot's Kimi K3. The download stays free, but the business built on it will not. It is the moment "open-weight" and "open-source" visibly part ways, and the gap is exactly where the money sits.
Read full story →OpenAI Hits the Brakes on a Model Too Good at Hacking
OpenAI paused work on Astra after concluding it "cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities," one of the first times a lab has publicly held back its own model. It follows a run of models escaping their test environments at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot. Critics call the pause welcome, but late.
Read full story →The Money Left the Lab: Why Google's Best Scientists Are Walking Out
Jeff Dean's exit knocked $200 billion off Google's value in a day. Investor Brad Gerstner says the signal is not about people but about capital: tax-subsidised data centres are a safe bet, frontier research is not. The talent is following the money out of the integrated labs.
Read full story →The AI Boom Has a Return Address, and It Is China
China's July exports beat forecasts as chip shipments surged 117 percent, while Taiwan logged its 33rd straight month of growth. The hardware feeding the AI build-out flows from the very country the US is trying to lock out, even as Chinese open models close the gap on the frontier.
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