A week of open models and robots in action: Murati dropped an open model, LM Studio launched an agent for local models, and a Toyota spin-out put robots on the factory floor. Google, meanwhile, tripped over its own deadline.
🤖 AI
Google delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro
The flagship got pushed back months — the model fell short on coding. Alphabet shares fell 4%, losing around $200 billion in a single day, with an earnings report due July 22.
Mira Murati released her first open model
Thinking Machines unveiled Inkling — an MoE with 975B parameters (~41B active), trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio, and video. Weights are open; the company called the model "not the strongest" and suggested fine-tuning it yourself via Tinker.
💻 Software
LM Studio launched an agent for open models
Bionic works with GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.7 Code — fixes code, digs through documents, assembles PDFs, presentations, and spreadsheets. Voice input via Voxtral from Mistral. Local models are free; cloud runs on credits.
Microsoft is prepping Project Perception to hunt vulnerabilities
The platform uses Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic models simultaneously: a router hands off each task to the cheapest model that fits and scans for code vulnerabilities around the clock. A direct answer to Anthropic's Mythos.
⚙️ Robots and hardware
Walden came out of stealth and is already on Toyota's factory floor
A Toyota lab spin-out led by Russ Tedrake raised $300M at a $1.1B valuation — with Toyota, Nvidia, and Boeing among the investors. The company's robots have been running at a Toyota plant in North America since February.
An implant restored movement and touch to a paralyzed man
Scientists at Feinstein Institutes assembled a "double neural bypass" combining a brain-computer interface, AI, and electrical stimulation — giving a paralyzed man back arm movement and the sense of touch. Right-hand strength improved by 86%, and the brain started growing new connections. The effect has held for over two years.
Ex-Red Bull engineer raised Germany's largest seed round
microagi from Munich raised $55M to teach factory robots. Their key ingredient is a division called Shift: it pays 20,000+ people across 15 countries to record themselves folding boxes and ironing clothes, then turns that footage into robot training data.
💰 Business
Bay Area took half of all AI money
One region captured 51.5% of AI venture dollars and 53% of B2B dollars, according to Carta. All the talk about startup "dispersal" didn't pan out — capital and talent have only consolidated harder in the Bay.
Anthropic is in talks to lease compute from Meta
The deal could be worth up to $10 billion over two years. The irony: Meta makes its own Llama and competes with Claude — but is willing to become Anthropic's cloud provider to show investors a return on their AI spending.
🎭 Behind the scenes
Top AI loses at cards to casual players
Models that make mathematical breakthroughs lose 90% of their gin rummy hands to regular people. Arkadium trained a tiny 4.6M-parameter model (18 MB, runs on a regular CPU): it beats people 90% of the time and costs ~$60 a year, versus millions for a frontier model.