July 22, 2026
Quick hits from across the AI world in the last 24 hours.
- ⚡ Quick hits
- Industry ServiceNow paid $40M for about 5% of Indian banking-software firm BusinessNext at a $700M valuation; the pair will jointly sell AI tools to financial institutions worldwide. TechCrunch ↗
- Open Source Nunchaku's 4-bit quantized diffusion inference is now integrated into Hugging Face Diffusers, cutting memory use and speeding up image-generation models in the mainstream library. Hugging Face ↗
- AIGC New paper 'Self Gradient Forcing' proposes native long-video extrapolation, letting video generation models extend clips well beyond training length without stitching, trending on Hugging Face papers. Hugging Face Papers ↗
- Funding Chinese embodied-AI startup PsiBot is raising about $100 million at a $1.48 billion valuation, led by carmaker Chery Automobile with Lens Technology participating. Bloomberg ↗
- Industry IBM's mainframe revenue fell 42% and shares dropped 25%, but CEO Arvind Krishna blamed AI-driven data-center cost inflation, insisting clients aren't abandoning the mainframe. TechCrunch ↗
- Research Simon Willison examined whether labs are 'pelicanmaxxing' — secretly optimizing for his pelican-on-a-bicycle SVG benchmark — citing a 48-combination study that found no evidence of gaming. Simon Willison ↗
- AIGC Tripo co-hosted the 'Worlds in Action' hackathon with World Labs and PICO during SIGGRAPH week, pairing 3D generation with world models and XR hardware partners. X @tripoai ↗
- Industry OpenAI is rolling out hard spend limits to all API accounts this week, letting developers cap API spending at a limit of their choice. X @OpenAIDevs ↗
- Industry Hyundai said its plan to deploy over 25,000 Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoids is not part of wage negotiations with striking workers at its Ulsan complex. Ars Technica ↗
- Open Source Startup Cactus open-sourced Cactus Hybrid, post-training Gemma 4 to emit confidence scores so on-device models hand off to the cloud only when unsure, matching Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. GitHub ↗
- Industry monday.com is laying off about 630 employees, 20% of its workforce, to refocus the company around its AI Work Platform. TechCrunch ↗
- Open Source GigaToken, a new open-source Rust tokenizer, claims roughly 1000x faster tokenization than Hugging Face tokenizers, exceeding 24 GB/s throughput on server CPUs via SIMD. GitHub ↗
- Research Claude users can now query the Anthropic Economic Index — the lab's public dataset on AI usage across occupations — via a new connector in any conversation. X @claudeai ↗
- Industry Samsung showed its first Gemini-powered Android XR smart glasses, designed with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker — audio-first with a camera, launching this fall. The Verge ↗
- AIGC Kuaishou's Kling published a Kling MCP tutorial showing how to build a complete cinematic video workflow inside your favorite AI agent, from script to finished performance. X @Kling_ai ↗
- AIGC Alibaba unveiled Qwen-Image-3.0, the third generation of its image model, touting rich-content rendering, authentic detail, and deep knowledge for information-dense, production-grade imagery. X @Alibaba_Qwen ↗
- Industry Meta rolled out its own AI-content detection and labeling system, which The Verge's testing found notably less reliable than Google's SynthID watermarking. The Verge ↗