This Week in All Things AI - Week 28-2026
This Week in All Things AI covers key developments in models, agents, tools, infrastructure, and policy curated from discussions in the All Things AI Telegram group.
If you follow AI for work, research, investing, or just to understand where the technology is heading, this weekly brief is a concise way to scan the most important launches, risks, and resources in a few focused minutes.
The week of 5th July to 11th July 2026 was defined by a wave of frontier model releases and infrastructure moves, with Grok 4.5, OpenAI’s GPT‑5.6 family, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, and Tencent’s Hy3 all pushing toward longer context, stronger coding, and more agentic workloads, while Meituan’s LongCat‑2.0 went fully open source and MiniMax paired its proposed 2.7T‑parameter M3 Pro with a fresh $2 billion fundraise and AGI-linked commitments. Infrastructure and efficiency stayed in focus as pxpipe-style token reduction, SambaNova’s $1B raise at $11B valuation, Microsoft’s reported move toward in-house MAI models in Office, and Qualcomm’s interest in Modular and Tenstorrent pointed to a broader push for better unit economics and greater control beyond Nvidia’s CUDA moat.
In parallel, culture and adoption signals remained more uneven: US enterprise surveys continued to show modest AI uptake, while filmmakers such as Gareth Edwards and designers responded strongly to tools including Seedance and Fable 5. Voices including Dylan Field and Chamath Palihapitiya highlighted the widening tension between rapidly improving capabilities, rising inference costs, and the slower, more complicated work of turning AI into durable products, workflows, and careers.
The sections that follow walk through these items day by day, with short context and links so you can dive deeper into the pieces most relevant to your work or interests.
Sunday 5th July 2026
How ByteDance is making Hollywood inroads with its Seedance video generator, thanks to low pricing, striking realism, and features like timeline-based prompting
via Steve IP
cut Fable 5 token usage by rendering text context as images
GitHub - teamchong/pxpipe: cut Fable 5 token usage by rendering text context as images
Monday 6th July 2026
via Robby Yung
LongCat-2.0 is now fully open-source— MIT licensed, no restrictions.
LongCat-2.0 is now fully open-source — MIT licensed, no restrictions.
Since our launch a few days ago, the response from the community has been incredible.
Thank you for all the feedback, discussions, and interest.
Introducing LongCat-2.0
1.6T parameters · MoE with ~48B active · 1M context
The full model behind Owl Alpha on @OpenRouter — now available.
Built for agentic coding from the ground up:
◆ LongCat Sparse Attention (LSA) — scales efficiently for 1M-context tokens
Jurassic World Rebirth’ and ‘Rogue One’ director Gareth Edwards on AI + filmmaking
It has no taste whatsoever. It is a genius at helping you. I view it like having a second-unit director who is a billionaire on acid. Like, it’ll do anything you ask, not a problem. Sometimes, it’ll go batshit crazy. And you’ll give it notes, and it’ll be like, ‘I don’t do notes. I’ll just do something totally different.’ But it’s worth it.
In response to Ming Guang Yong question about Qualcomm reportedly paying US$4B for Modular, the following view was shared in the group:
el-GOOG paid USD 2.7 billion for CharacterAI, which was in effect an acqui-hire for Noam Shazeer who is credited in many ways for the rise of Gemini to be in LLM conversations when it was massively behind the curve.
Modular has Chris Lattner of LLVM, Swift fame. Modular ultimately built a unified, hardware-agnostic AI software stack and maybe Qualcomm thinks that they need to attack NVIDIA's moat which is CUDA.
Qualcomm reportedly has entered advanced talks to acquire Tenstorrent (Jim Keller's AI chip startup) for $8–10 billion, meaning Qualcomm is potentially committing over $14 billion to reshape its AI silicon portfolio within weeks.
Personally, I'm keeping an eye on the disaggregated inference space and it could be that a new architecture might be needed for future inference demand.
Tuesday 7th July 2026
Tencent Releases Hy3: Efficient Open-Source AI Rivaling Top Models
Hy3 features 295 billion total parameters but activates only 21 billion during use, plus a 3.8 billion-parameter layer for better reasoning and a massive 256,000-token context window
It excels on benchmarks like SWE-Bench Multilingual at 75.8% and Terminal Bench at 71.7%, often matching or beating much larger rivals such as GLM-5.2 and GPT-5.5.
Refined from April 2026 preview feedback and now under permissive Apache 2.0 license, it shines in real-world workflows per blind human evals by 270 experts, earning praise for agent reliability and easy deployment on 8x H200 GPUs.
https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/2074148098876768478
US builds AI, citizens lag 🤖
Wednesday 8th July 2026
Microsoft reportedly looking to reduce AI costs is starting to replace models from OpenAI and Anthropic with its MAI models in products like Excel and Outlook
Chip startup SambaNova raises $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, underscoring investors’ conviction in rising demand for infrastructure tied to AI
Thursday 9th July 2026
SpaceXAI announced Grok 4.5 as its first model specialized for coding and agentic tasks, trained in collaboration with Cursor on tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs using RL for multi-step engineering workflows.
Grok 4.5 is now accessible via SpaceXAI console, Grok Build, and Cursor with limits reset for free starts, though unavailable in the EU until mid-July 2026.
Friday 10th July 2026
We’re launching the GPT‑5.6 family of models for general availability following our limited preview: our new flagship, Sol, alongside Terra, a balanced model for everyday work, and Luna, our most cost-efficient model.
GPT-5.6: Frontier intelligence that scales with your ambition
MiniMax secures HK$16 billion (approximately $2 billion USD) in a new funding round that was seven times oversubscribed, attracting over 100 investors including global sovereign wealth funds and Chinese institutions. CEO and founder Yan Junjie announced he will receive no salary until the company achieves AGI and will allocate shares equivalent to 4% of the company's total equity from his personal holdings to reward long-term employees, plus 1% to support the open-source community.
Chamath Palihapitiya on The All-In Podcast where Chamath reveals his company's AI inference token costs are doubling every 45 days with only about 5% productivity improvement. Chamath explains that further model iterations now demand far more tokens due to hitting diminishing returns and an asymptote in gains, prompting a strategic pause at his firm. He advises AI-related companies to exit or raise funds at current high valuations before widespread cost pressures affect the sector in the next 3-4 years.