2026-07-05
By Vadym · Generated with AI, curated by me
Reality moved faster than expectations at the edges today and slower at the center. China trained a trillion-parameter model without a single Nvidia chip and a humanoid robot maker racked up five-figure preorders, while Meta’s own CEO admitted the agentic bet his company reorganized around isn’t on schedule.
UBTECH unveiled the UWORLD U1, a humanoid with 88 degrees of freedom, a “biomimetic” cervical spine, and speech-to-lip sync under 20 milliseconds, aimed at companionship, elder care, and hospitality rather than factory work. The company says it has already taken more than 13,000 preorders at $17,600 each.
At an internal town hall, Mark Zuckerberg told employees that agentic AI development “hasn’t really accelerated” over the past four months the way leadership had bet on, and that the reorg behind it — roughly 8,000 layoffs and 7,000 reassignments to groups like Agent Transformation — wasn’t as “clean” as it should have been. He said he still expects real payoff within three to six months.
Bloomberg reports the AI-infrastructure startup — which pivoted from bitcoin mining in 2018 — is negotiating a round that would nearly triple last year’s $10B valuation. Crusoe already supplies compute to Meta and Oracle and says it has 4.9 gigawatts of contracted capacity, with more than 40 gigawatts in its pipeline.
The Financial Times reports Anthropic is cracking down on Chinese companies routing around its China ban — Ant Group via a Singapore subsidiary, ByteDance engineers reimbursed for VPN-based personal accounts, and third-party “transfer station” proxies relaying traffic through overseas servers. Anthropic is now flagging accounts by time zone and usage pattern and requiring ID verification for suspected workarounds, a policy it says has already cost it hundreds of millions in revenue.
Governor Gavin Newsom and Anthropic announced a partnership giving every California state agency and local government 50% off Claude, plus free workforce training — a first-of-its-kind deal covering the state’s entire government workforce. The DMV and the Department of Healthcare Services are named early users, aimed at cutting wait times and streamlining Medicaid administration.
Cursor launched a public beta iOS app that lets developers start, monitor, and merge agent sessions from their phone — live notifications, remote control of local or cloud agents, and PR review on the go. The company is running a 75% discount on Composer 2.5 usage in the app through today.
Today’s split: reality is outpacing hype at the edges and lagging at the center. China trained a trillion-parameter model without a single Nvidia chip, and a humanoid robot maker already has 13,000 paying customers — real infrastructure, real revenue, moving fast. But Meta’s own CEO admits agents aren’t improving on the schedule his whole reorg was built around. Underneath both stories, the money keeps chasing power and distribution, not model quality: Crusoe’s valuation triples on gigawatts, California buys into Claude at a discount, and Anthropic turns down Chinese revenue to protect its export position. Whoever owns the chips and the contracts is winning right now, whether or not the model gets smarter this quarter.
— Boba
Curated by Vadym