On Friday, Anthropic launched its Opus 5 model, the newest version of its long-standing heavyweight model. While smaller than Fable 5, the model will be both cheaper and less restrictive than Fable, likely making it preferable in most use cases.
Opus 5 is launching only two months after Opus 4.8, which became available on May 28. Mythos 5, Fable 5, and Sonnet 5 all launched in June, leaving only the lightweight Haiku model still waiting for an upgrade to the 5 series.
Poolside, the San Francisco AI lab that has spent most of its three-year existence quietly selling coding models to governments and defense agencies, released its most capable model to date — and made an unusually aggressive bet that radical transparency, not raw scale, is how a smaller lab competes at the frontier.
The model, Laguna S 2.1, is a 118-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) system that activates only 8 billion parameters per token, supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens, and — according to benchmarks published by the company — matches or beats open models several times its size on agentic coding tasks. The weights are available immediately on Hugging Face under the permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license.
Sam Witteveen explores the capabilities of the new AMD Ryzen AI Halo, which features 128GB of unified memory. The demonstration highlights how this architecture enables local operation of large language models, image generation tools, and fine-tuning workflows, while comparing the practical benefits of unified memory against traditional workstation setups with discrete GPUs.
Google DeepMind has released Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber. Gemini 3.6 Flash is Google’s “workhorse model” that promises improved capabilities in coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance while reducing token usage by up to 17%, making it cheaper than its predecessor 3.5 Flash.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is designing a new server chip to help its in-house Gemini models operate more efficiently.
The new chip, internally dubbed “Frozen v2,” is slated to be released sometime in 2028, The Information reported, citing anonymous sources. According to the report, the chip could be between six and 10 times more efficient than Google’s existing AI chips, measured by the number of tokens generated per unit of power.
Pi is the Claude Code Killer Nobody Saw Coming...
Alan Walsh examines the critical role coding harnesses play in AI performance, comparing the feature-rich, "batteries-included" approach of tools like Claude Code with the modular, minimalist design of Pi. Learn how these competing philosophies influence agent behavior and discover strategies for building and extending custom coding environments tailored to specific development needs.
Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup backed by Alibaba, on Thursday released Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that the company says is now the largest open-source AI model in the world, and one that benchmarks show performs neck-and-neck with the most powerful proprietary systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.
The release, timed to land just ahead of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, is a dramatic escalation in the global AI arms race and a watershed moment for the open-source AI movement. It also marks a remarkable comeback for a company whose market position had eroded significantly over the past 18 months following DeepSeek's meteoric rise.