August 4, 2026
Quick hits from across the AI world in the last 24 hours.
- ⚡ Quick hits
- Agents A US appeals court lifted the injunction barring Perplexity's shopping agent from Amazon, ruling that users, not Perplexity, access the platform through the agent. The Decoder ↗
- Policy The White House's voluntary frontier-model cyber testing framework will not cover open-weight models, advisers told AI firms at an August 4 meeting. The Verge ↗
- Industry Alibaba's Taotian opened 2027 graduate hiring with over 90% of roles in AI, centered on AI application engineers and AI agent optimization engineers. 量子位 ↗
- Open Source NVIDIA released Alpamayo 2 Super, a 34B open vision-language-action driving model on Hugging Face under the Linux Foundation's permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license. MarkTechPost ↗
- Industry Microsoft set per-unit AI token budgets and made GPT-5.6 its cheaper internal default, with an executive saying tokenmaxxing is not what it optimizes for. 量子位 ↗
- Industry Startup Infinity says its Ignition agent built CUDA-like GPU software for chipmaker d-Matrix in ten hours, after raising $15 million at a $100 million valuation. 量子位 ↗
- Agents CopilotKit open-sourced the MIT-licensed Channels SDK, letting any AG-UI agent run inside Slack and Microsoft Teams without rewriting its model or orchestration. MarkTechPost ↗
- AIGC Alibaba made Qwen-Image-3.0-Pro available on Qwen Cloud and on fal, opening its newest image model to third-party generation platforms. X @Alibaba_Qwen ↗
- AIGC Genspark added FLUX 3 to its AI Video Agent, bringing native audio, text-to-video, image-to-video and video continuation with multilingual dialogue. X @genspark_ai ↗
- Agents DeepSeek-V4-Flash reshaped Agent Arena's cost-performance frontier with a $0.024 median cost per task, the leaderboard operators said. X @arena ↗
- Industry Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable, whose platform runs built-in AI data agents, for $1.285 billion cash, far below its $11.7 billion 2021 valuation. SiliconANGLE ↗
- AIGC Canva promoted Canva Code, which turns prompts into interactive games, quizzes and widgets, publishing five sample builds including a timed drawing challenge. X @canva ↗
- Open Source Simon Willison shipped LLM 0.32, adding reasoning traces, the OpenAI Responses API, provider-hosted server-side tools and Git-style content-addressable logging. Simon Willison ↗
- Industry AMD's data center revenue more than doubled to $6.7 billion, up 107% year over year, as its Helios AI rack platform begins ramping. SiliconANGLE ↗
- Industry Ollama said DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 is its fastest-growing model ever by token usage and that it is scaling capacity in the US and Europe. X @ollama ↗
- Safety The UK AI Security Institute published a cybersecurity evaluation of Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, which Anthropic amplified. X @AnthropicAI ↗
- Safety OpenAI disclosed two incidents that occurred during third-party cyber evaluations of its models, detailing what happened and its remediation steps. OpenAI ↗
- AIGC Pika launched the Pika API Club, a $10-per-month membership offering discounted access to 100-plus video, image, audio and LLM models through one API. X @pika_labs ↗
- Agents AWS made Web Search generally available on Amazon Bedrock, grounding models in Amazon's web index via one API parameter with zero data egress. AWS Machine Learning Blog ↗
- Research Artificial Analysis launched an Endpoint Accuracy Index measuring how much of an open-weights model's accuracy each serverless API endpoint actually preserves. X @ArtificialAnlys ↗
- AIGC Qwen-Image-3.0-Pro debuted at #5 in LMArena's Text-to-Image Arena with 1,263 points, up from Qwen-Image-2.0-Pro's #15 and 1,191 points. X @arena ↗
- AIGC Spotify said Merlin, representing over 30,000 independent labels, joined Universal in backing its opt-in paid AI remix and covers tool. TechCrunch ↗
- Agents Cognition shipped Devin Fusion in Devin Cloud, saying harness and model gains make it 4% more intelligent and 27% cheaper on FrontierCode 1.1. X @cognition ↗
- Agents Mem0 launched Dream, a background layer that continuously reconciles contradictory memories inside agent projects instead of leaving conflicts to accumulate. X @mem0ai ↗
- AIGC Tripo AI won Best in Show at SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live for on-stage game-ready 3D asset generation, with the audience creating over 600 models live. X @tripoai ↗
- Open Source Databricks released Omnigent, an open-source AI meta-harness for composing and governing coding and workflow agents in one place. X @databricks ↗
- Models Liquid AI released LFM2.5-2.6B for on-device agents, claiming 220 tokens/second on an Apple M5 Max within 2.5GB of memory. Hugging Face ↗
- Research Microsoft Research introduced PRISM2, a pathology foundation model trained on 2.3 million whole-slide images and millions of report-derived question-answer pairs. X @MSFTResearch ↗