Model News
Google puts DeepMind under Kavukcuoglu as Hassabis shifts to chair
By Arjun
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12 Aug 10:10 AM
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Via CNBC
Alphabet named Koray Kavukcuoglu head of DeepMind, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, while cofounder Demis Hassabis moves to chair. Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind CTO and Google's chief AI architect, will own Gemini model development, frontier research, and the Gemini app and developer stacks. CNBC frames the shift as a push to close coding and frontier gaps with OpenAI and Anthropic after 2026 releases failed to reset the race. Analysts say the remits look more like a product group than a pure lab. The caveat is that a leadership shuffle does not by itself restore lost pretraining talent or guarantee a frontier leap.
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Tencent said Hy3's production model, released in July 2026, now ranks among the top three models globally by OpenRouter token use, while WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy lead AI office and coding tools inside China. Second-quarter capital expenditure hit RMB 52.8 billion, up 176 percent year on year, mainly for AI compute behind Hy upgrades, WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy inference, Weixin AI, and cloud demand. Free cash flow turned negative after capital expenditure payments exceeded operating cash flow. Management frames Hy3 as a step toward later Hy models. Capex intensity is clear in the filing, yet Hy4 is only later this year, so the next leap is unproven.
Alibaba released downloadable weights for flagship Qwen3.8-Max while adding commercial terms that force large monetizing users to buy a separate Qwen licence. South China Morning Post reports the rule hits affiliates running model-as-a-service or AI work-assistant businesses with more than $50 million in aggregate revenue over any consecutive 12 months. Internal use stays exempt if the model, outputs, or capabilities are not offered to third parties. Most developers can still copy, modify, and distribute the 2.4-trillion-parameter sparse MoE for free if they pay their own compute. How Qwen will detect threshold breaches, and how derivatives are defined, remains unclear outside the licence text.
SpaceXAI launched an early beta of Grok Bot as always-on AI teammates that keep a shared cloud computer, sign into apps and websites, and finish multi-step jobs until they need approval. Users can run several bots in parallel, including a coordinator that assigns work, and message them from desktop or iOS. Access starts for SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor Teams Premium subscribers, with enterprise users on a waitlist. The product lands after SpaceX's agreed Cursor acquisition and amid workplace agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft. Reliability across arbitrary apps, and how credentials are shared among bots, still need real-world scrutiny in gated beta.
AI coding startup Cursor plans to open its first India office by year-end, Asia-Pacific head Simon Green told Moneycontrol, after hiring remotely across Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai. India is now its third-largest market, with more than 3 million developers after tripling in a year. Cursor launched India-priced Start at Rs 649 a month with UPI, between Free and the roughly Rs 2,000 Pro tier. The move lands while SpaceX's agreed acquisition is still expected to close in the third quarter. Office timing and headcount were not spelled out, so this remains a market signal more than a completed build-out.