Weekly 10 to 16 August 2026
AI models race, Databricks hits $7B ARR, and infrastructure shifts
Frontier models advance with DeepSeek V4-Pro and ultrafast GPT-5.6, while Databricks scales to $7B ARR
Themes this week
- Frontier AI models advance with aggressive pricing and speed optimizations.
- Databricks hits $7B ARR, signaling enterprise AI maturity.
- Infrastructure and security updates focus on DRAM health and protocol monitoring.
- Funding rounds highlight AI infrastructure and defense sectors.
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813
DeepSeek launches V4-Pro, rivals Kimi K3, priced at $0.435/1M
Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast
OpenAI previews Ultrafast mode, 14x faster GPT-5.6 Sol
Grok 4.6
Grok 4.6 benchmarks released, scores 61 on Artificial Analysis Index
Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
Paper details method to steal chain-of-thought from proprietary LLM APIs
Databricks Just Crossed $7B ARR Growing 80% (!): A 30-Point Acceleration, a $190B Valuation, and the Margin Bill for Agents
Databricks crosses $7B ARR, growing 80%, valued at $190B
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Data, Neolab, AI Infrastructure, Defense And AI Coding Lead
Weekly roundup: Databricks raises $5B, AI infrastructure and defense lead
40 Companies Joined The Unicorn Board In July, The Highest Count In 4 Years
40 companies joined unicorn board in July, highest in 4 years
AI code testing platform Blacksmith raises $45 Mn in Series B led by Peak XV
AI code testing platform Blacksmith raises $45M Series B at $550M valuation
Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
Deep dive into a 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
Spaghettifying DRAM
Analysis of DRAM degradation and 'spaghettification' in modern servers
Certificate Transparency Monitoring is now generally available
Cloudflare CT monitoring is generally available, no longer emails certificates
How Cloudflare detects MCP traffic and helps secure it
Cloudflare Gateway detects and secures Model Context Protocol traffic
Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations
How customer needs shaped integrations in Kubernetes on Oxide hardware
Show the other 46 stories
DeepSeek Harness developer preview
Gemini 3.7 Flash
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
Mistral OCR 4.1
How RingCentral builds AI-native work from engineering to ops
See how RingCentral uses ChatGPT Work and Codex to accelerate AI product development and centralize operational intelligence across enginee…
MindTopo reveals VLMs’ spatial reasoning abilities
A path, a fence, a knot. MindTopo sets a new benchmark for testing how AI understands topological relationships and highlights new opportun…
AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain
When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
Previewing Ultrafast mode: GPT-5.6 Sol at up to 14X the speed
Preview Ultrafast, a new OpenAI API service tier that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster. Powered by Cerebras, it delivers up to 750 output…
OpenAI appoints Dali Rajic as Chief Revenue Officer
to lead its global revenue organization and help businesses realize the full value of AI.
CORS Chat
Tool: CORS Chat I built this today ( with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh ) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and…
Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview
The Pulse: Meta’s self-inflicted resignation-wave
The social media giant is offering $1M+ retainer equity grants to staff who are leaving: and even this is not effective. Also: is Grok Bot…
EP222: What is Google’s TPU?
A TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) is Google’s custom AI chip, designed from scratch for the giant matrix multiplications that modern models li…
Total eclipse of the Internet: traffic impacts in Iceland, Spain, and Portugal
Cloudflare's data shows a clear impact on Internet traffic from Iceland to Spain and Portugal, following the path of totality of the total…
Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is now supported on Vercel CDN
Inside the Vercel intern experience
Thrive Capital Finds its Lane as a New Kind of Venture Investor
Plus, the dubious business of prediction markets & the White House targets an OpenAI policy exec
OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings raises $2B to bring AI to the enterprise
Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation from investors like SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Alti…
Snapchat Has Gen Z’s Attention In India; It’s Time To Monetise Now
India’s festive shopping journey is becoming less linear with every season, and Snapchat is betting that this transition can help…
Qwen 3.8 27B
Qwen3.8-2.4T
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B-FP8
Every Fucking Website (2020)
Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
Delta
Qwen3.8-27B
GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
Z.ai says GLM-5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym, vs. Mythos 5's 83.8%, and its most sensitive cybersecurity functions will only be available to verified users (Reuters)
Reuters : Z.ai says GLM-5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym, vs. Mythos 5's 83.8%, and its most sensitive cybersecurity functions will only be ava…
Filing: Nvidia has a nearly $21B stake in SpaceX and a $30B stake in Intel; Nvidia invested as much as $2B in xAI in 2025 and $5B in Intel (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg)
Lynn Doan / Bloomberg : Filing: Nvidia has a nearly $21B stake in SpaceX and a $30B stake in Intel; Nvidia invested as much as $2B in xAI i…
DeepSeek launches V4-Pro, its most advanced model that rivals Kimi K3 on some benchmarks but is priced much lower, at $0.435/1M input and $0.87/1M output tokens (The Information)
The Information : DeepSeek launches V4-Pro, its most advanced model that rivals Kimi K3 on some benchmarks but is priced much lower, at $0.…
License plate reader searches should require a warrant
Investor letter: Thrive's 2022 early-stage $516M fund that invested in OpenAI and SpaceX was worth $3.7B+ as of the end of June, net of fees and other charges (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)
Natasha Mascarenhas / Bloomberg : Investor letter: Thrive's 2022 early-stage $516M fund that invested in OpenAI and SpaceX was worth $3.7B+…
Sources: Nvidia in talks to invest up to $3B in SoftBank-backed data center developer SB Energy that aims to IPO soon and is behind a huge OpenAI campus in Ohio (The Information)
The Information : Sources: Nvidia in talks to invest up to $3B in SoftBank-backed data center developer SB Energy that aims to IPO soon and…
Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook
https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about_dis... https://www.neowin.net/news/facebook-ads-are-so-hard-to-bloc...
'Not acceptable': Judge orders Google to make rival app store installs easier
One month after Epic Games and Google seemingly stopped fighting over the future of Android app distribution, they were back in a San Franc…
Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Sources: China plans to soon lift a travel ban on Manus founders as the company unwinds its $2B acquisition by Meta; CEO Xiao Hong plans to return to Singapore (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)
Zijing Wu / Financial Times : Sources: China plans to soon lift a travel ban on Manus founders as the company unwinds its $2B acquisition b…
Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
2026 Eclipse Webcams
Gloomberb
The MSI Claw EX is the most important PC handheld since Steam Deck — I still wouldn’t buy one
As The Verge's resident handheld reviewer, I have nearly every portable gaming PC on a shelf in my house. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus is now…