Evening brief

Saturday, July 18

1 people · 0 companies · 4 topics

TL;DR Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 (2.8T-param MoE, first open model to top LMArena Frontend Code Arena) was the headline model release of the period; WAIC 2026 opened in Shanghai with WAICO’s 29-nation founding and 300+ product debuts, and Apple escalated its OpenAI trade secrets lawsuit with preservation letters to ~40 ex-employees.

Models & research

  • model-releases Kimi K3 dropped July 16 from Moonshot AI: 2.8T-parameter MoE, 1M context, native multimodal, currently #1 on LMArena Frontend Code Arena (17-place jump past Claude Fable 5), 93.5% on GPQA Diamond. API live now; full open weights drop by July 27 on Hugging Face. VentureBeat · Tom’s Hardware · simonw’s write-up: simonwillison.net

  • WAIC 2026 (Shanghai, July 17-20) opened July 17 with 300+ simultaneous product debuts, including MiniMax M3 (MSA architecture, 1M context), Huawei Atlas 950 supernode, and the mass-production ZTE Nubia AI Agent Phone; 29 nations signed the China-backed WAICO founding agreement on the conference eve (July 16). TechTimes · Xinhua

  • Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook (July 16-17): every notebook now includes a secure cloud computer for native code execution; rolling out to AI Ultra users first across 30M+ users. Google Blog · 9to5Google

People

  • simonw shipped two tools July 17: llm-cliche-highlighter (pastes text and highlights AI writing clichés with pattern badges) and mermaid-ascii (Mermaid-to-ASCII via WebAssembly, rebuilt from Grok Build’s leaked Apache-licensed Rust code using Claude Code for web). tools.simonwillison.net · simonwillison.net

Tools & dev

  • Apple sent legal preservation letters July 17 to ~40 former employees now at OpenAI, escalating last week’s trade secrets lawsuit (which named Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan) and warning them to preserve all potentially relevant communications. MacRumors · 9to5Mac

  • EU’s DMA binding orders (July 16) require Google to give rival AI assistants system-level Android access previously exclusive to Gemini: voice activation, background tasks across 11 feature groups; most measures due with Android 18 by August 2027. CNBC · Medianama

OSS

  • GitHub trending today: DeepTutor (531 stars, HKUDS, lifelong personalized tutoring on LLMs), OpenInterpreter (431 stars, updated to highlight Kimi K3 as its featured open model), GitHub Copilot SDK (233 stars, multi-platform SDK for embedding Copilot Agent into apps/services). github.com/trending