Jennifer Evans

American AI will die unmourned. The funeral notices arrived all week. On Friday, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 took first place on the Frontend Code Arena, passing Claude Fable 5, a seventeen-place jump from its predecessor. The full weights ship July 27. Moonshot then closed new paid signups because demand outran its capacity to serve. On Sunday, hours before US futures opened, Alibaba teased Qwen3.8 at a claimed 2.4 trillion parameters, weights promised.

UPDATED 7/19: The research was peer-reviewed. The KTransformers paper was published at SOSP (ACM’s top systems venue), reporting 4.62–19.74× prefill speedups and 1.25–4.09× decode speedups over existing systems, and it’s already being cited in 2026 systems papers. The CPU requirement loosened. A March 2026 update added an AVX2-only CPU backend, and the latest release adds AVX-512 fallback for FP8/BF16 where AMX isn’t available. The hardware floor keeps dropping.

A story from February 2026 about an open-source project explicitly conducting surveillance tech is recirculating on social media, as the dark history and work of data synthesis company Palantir becomes more and more controversial and gains more and more attention.