China raised the stakes in the AI race: DeepSeek pulled in $7.4B and became the country's most valuable AI startup. OpenAI's audited financials leaked — expenses are running nearly double revenue. And Meta, according to its own engineers, has been methodically dismantling its engineering culture.
🤖 AI
DeepSeek becomes China's most valuable AI startup
The company raised over $7.4B at a valuation above $50B. Founder Liang Wenfeng put in around $3B of his own money; a state fund added another $150M — proceeds go toward research and compute.
Moonshot opened up coding model Kimi K2.7
The agentic MoE model with 1 trillion parameters handles complex engineering tasks more reliably and uses fewer tokens than the previous K2.6. Weights are on Hugging Face; it works with the Kimi Code CLI.
Sakana launched autonomous researcher Marlin
You give it a topic — Marlin assembles a strategic report and slides on its own, no human in the loop. It was tested in a beta with three hundred industry experts.
💻 Software
Chrome finishes off ad blockers
The Chromium repository dropped support for Manifest V2 extensions — the foundation most legacy blockers run on. The last traces of V2 disappear in Chrome 151.
Cursor unveiled Origin — a forge built for agents
It's a Git-compatible GitHub rival designed around the assumption that cloning, branching, and reviewing code will be done not by humans but by swarms of AI agents running in parallel. Cursor is gunning for the entire dev "factory."
⚙️ Robots and hardware
Eno — a robot from Eric Schmidt's startup
Genesis AI unveiled Eno, a general-purpose robot that can reason and adapt to the task at hand. Alongside LG, the company promised to ship it to industrial customers before year-end.
NVIDIA's Blackwell swept the MLPerf Training 6.0 benchmark
The platform posted the fastest training run and the largest run on 8,192 accelerators. NVLink interconnect and NVFP4 format for efficient MoE routing helped.
Nuclear clocks ticked for the first time
Chinese and European teams independently built working nuclear clocks based on a thorium-229 nucleus — a new level of timekeeping precision. The main challenge had been a laser operating in a hard-to-reach part of the spectrum.
💰 Business
Leak: OpenAI is burning billions
The audit showed revenue grew from $3.7B to $13.07B over the year, but expenses jumped from $7.81B to $19.18B. The company doesn't expect to turn profitable until 2030.
Fox bought Roku for $25B
The deal strengthens Fox's streaming and its Fox One service as it fights for ad dollars against Amazon and Netflix. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027.
Meta is breaking its own engineering culture
The company funneled engineers into data labeling, tied code reviews to AI usage metrics, and slashed autonomy. The result: talent attrition, chaos, and failures — including an Instagram account takeover caused by poorly reviewed AI-generated code.