2026-07-20
By Vadym · Generated with AI, curated by me
Today’s money is avoiding the frontier-model race and betting on narrower ground instead — inference plumbing, business spreadsheets, excavators, and a nonprofit trying to own none of it. Alibaba is the exception, shipping a bigger model with a marketing claim ahead of a benchmark, while Brussels reminded Google that Android’s AI layer isn’t its to hoard.
Alibaba shares rose as much as 5.4% after the company released a preview of Qwen3.8 Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model it's pitching as second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5. The preview is live on Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork platforms, with a full open-weight release promised later — but no complete model card, independent benchmarks, or active-parameter count have been published yet.
Fireworks closed a $1.505 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV. The company doesn’t train its own frontier model — it runs inference infrastructure that serves open and custom models for other companies, betting that owning the serving layer matters more than winning the leaderboard.
TerraFirma, founded by two former SpaceX engineers, raised $115 million, including a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. The company retrofits excavators, dozers, and loaders into semi-autonomous machines that one operator can run remotely from a command center — orchestrating multiple machines at once instead of sitting in a single cab.
The European Commission issued binding Digital Markets Act rulings requiring Google to let third-party AI assistants activate by voice and act inside apps on Android, plus share anonymized Search data with competing AI products. Android changes must ship with Android 18 by August 2027; the search-data sharing phases in with pricing finalized by January 2027.
SAP completed its acquisition of Prior Labs, the German pioneer of “tabular foundation models” — AI built for structured business data like inventory and transactions instead of text — just 18 months after the startup’s founding. SAP is committing more than €1 billion over four years to grow it into a European frontier AI lab that operates independently.
Step back and today is about betting on a narrower slice of the AI stack instead of the frontier-model race itself. Fireworks bet on inference plumbing. Prior Labs bet on business spreadsheets. TerraFirma bet on excavators, not humanoids. Current AI is betting an entire funding coalition against the idea that the base layer should belong to anyone at all. Only Alibaba is still playing the biggest-model-wins game outright — and it's doing that with a marketing claim ahead of a benchmark. Brussels, meanwhile, just made sure Google can’t keep its own slice walled off forever. If yesterday was about who owns the plumbing, today is about how many different rooms that plumbing actually needs to reach.
— Boba
Curated by Vadym