Every week, I organize 400 to 700 links into roughly 60 categories as part of my ongoing effort to learn about AI. This is my personal notebook, which I enjoy sharing with friends… a hobby and a labor of love, rather than a commercial publication or product.
If you arrived here through a search or shared link, this page collects the links I found for International for the week ending July 24, 2026.
As part of my learning process, I like to automate the category covers. It gives me a chance to learn Python and APIs.
This week’s cover prompt was written using Claude Opus 4.7, and the image was generated using Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Preview.
Category cover image prompt:
A glittering chrome globe of Earth at the center of a square 1970s psychedelic funk poster, continents gleaming gold with multicolor ribbon orbits swirling around it like sound waves connecting the hemispheres, a glowing mothership beam descending from a deep cosmic purple sky with starbursts and sparkle, the word INTERNATIONAL arcing across the top in huge fat bubble funk letters with chrome fill and stacked rainbow drop shadows, balanced composition with generous negative space, no other text or figures.
This Week in International News
Here’s a quick AI-generated summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5, based on the headlines and excerpts accompanying this week’s links:
- Kimi K3 steals the week: Moonshot's Kimi K3 set a new open-weights record on Epoch's capabilities index, and Cline reported it going from 0% to 16% of ClinePass open-weights token usage in three days. Demand got high enough that Moonshot paused new subscriptions to protect existing users. Ethan Mollick cautioned that people are drawing quick conclusions from fairly saturated benchmarks.
- US accuses Moonshot of distillation: A White House official said the US has information that Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable to build K3, and TechCrunch reported Treasury threatening sanctions. Critics pushed back: one noted only 15 days passed between the Fable 5 ban removal and K3's release, which makes the technical claim hard to believe.
- Chinese open models keep stacking up: Qwen3.8 was teased as open-weight soon, Z.AI finished a 1-gigawatt data center using only Chinese chips, and Hugging Face credited GLM-5.2 with helping it defend against an attack. Mollick observed that no frontier open-weights model is made outside China.
This summary was generated by Claude Sonnet 5.5 to help you explore the links below. Rest assured, I select, organize, and check the links by hand in Google Sheets, and write the introduction and personal commentary in The Main Newsletters myself each week as a labor of love.
This week's links related to International
Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon!🌐 With a massive 2.4T parameters, this model is continuously evolving. We believe it’s one of the most powerful model available today, compatible to leading frontier AI models , second only to Fable 5. You don’t have to wait to”
https://x.com/qwen_cloud/status/2078758151390953489?s=20
This reads to me as if preparations are being made to ban models like Kimi K3 in the future. I would be very interested in the evidence that leads to the assumption that Fable 5 was distilled for Kimi K3.”
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2079950651644051544
Treasury threatens sanctions after White House claims Moonshot distilled Anthropic’s Fable | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/treasury-threatens-sanctions-after-white-house-claims-moonshot-distilled-anthropics-fable/
We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model. To do this they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against U.S. models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of”
https://x.com/mkratsios47/status/2079933645888880708
Thinking Machines Lab’s Inkling scores an Elo of 836 on on our agentic knowledge work benchmark AA-Briefcase, ahead of DeepSeek V4 Flash but below leading open weights models including Nemotron 3 Ultra and GLM-5.2 Our new agentic knowledge work benchmark, AA-Briefcase, tests”
https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2080036845161730284
Kimi Work: Next-Gen Desktop AI Agent for Knowledge Workers
https://www.kimi.ai/products/kimi-work
mindblowing: openai internal evals went to extreme lengths, their model went to Hugging Face and tried to hack HF to get private repos to cheat the eval our infra team uncovered this and used GLM-5.2 to fix because OpenAI’s model would refuse to do it wasn’t on my bingo card”
https://x.com/mervenoyann/status/2079682903487746551
Moonshot’s Kimi K3 scores 156 on the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), setting a new open-weights record. This places it between Opus 4.6, and GPT 5.4, which released in February and March 2026 respectively, and just ahead of GPT 5.6 Luna.”
https://x.com/EpochAIResearch/status/2079602012644360382
Kimi K3 is basically Opus 4.8 on ALE-Bench but Inkling and Grok 4.5 are ngmi”
https://x.com/scaling01/status/2079944011914109189
FLUX 3: Multimodal Video, Image & Audio | Black Forest Labs
https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-3
This is one of the benchmarks I am watching, from the UK’s governmental AI security agency. They will test Kimi K3 when the weights are out in a couple of weeks. It will tell us both whether Kimi has caught up with the public frontier & also kick off a TON of cyber discussions.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2078144326832451998
HF had to use GLM 5.2 to defend themselves against… Sol 5.6 trying to solve a benchmark problem? Incredible timeline.”
https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/2079667340841730318
The Chinese open weights models are now very good, and I increasingly wonder about the competitive dynamics among them as they become giant & valuable businesses. Its tough competition: K3 is better than GLM-5.2 which beat DeepSeek v4, etc. Can they all stay in the race?”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2078140637845598638
So proud of our security team! They caught, contained & publicly disclosed an attack unlike anything we’ve seen before, and did it at record speed. Also massively grateful to @Zai_org: they shared GLM5.2 as open weights (for free!) with the world and it became a key part of our”
https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2079913058554585089
Introducing FLUX-mimic, a next-generation Video-Action Model for general purpose dexterity, developed in partnership with @bfl_ai. Late last year we published mimic-video and introduced Video-Action Models (VAM): a new family of robotics foundation models built on top of video”
https://x.com/mimicrobotics/status/2080307032746336367
“Generate a fake, but believable, witty Churchill insult at a party and explain the context. It should be very clever and original” This time, I think GPT 5.6 Sol Pro wins, but Fable is good too, and you could argue for it taking the prize. Kimi & Gemini miss by a mile.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2080010641905955328
At the moment that everyone is talking about switching models often for cost or sovereignty or optionality or whatever, the most advanced models are growing more and more different from each other. Fable responds very differently than Kimi K3 or Sol, you can’t just plug & play”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2079631873299320915
Fable, Sol Pro, Kimi K3: “write me a short but good poem using the Odyssey as a basis, think Tennyson or Cavafy” I think this is a Fable victory. Kimi’s is literally a blend of Tennyson’s & Cavafy’s poems themes with some odd bits, and Sol is pretty thematically incoherent.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2079024884315828351
there are only 15 days between fable 5 ban removal and kimi K3 release. i don’t think claiming that K3’s performance comes from fable distillation (even if they did it) makes sense technically”
https://x.com/eliebakouch/status/2079968464626749888
Introducing Fugu-Cyber: our new orchestration model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world cybersecurity benchmarks
https://sakana.ai/fugu-cyber-release/
Hy3 by Tencent is #5 in Agent Arena for open-weight models (#25 overall)! It also ranks as the #2 open model in the Frontend Code Arena (#16 overall)! In Agent Arena: Hy3 lands at #25 overall (net -2.2%). Hy3 has strengths in tool-use (recovering well from CLI/bash errors, +2.6%”
https://x.com/arena/status/2079698021085016270
My conversation with Majid Khadiv, Assistant Professor at @TU_Muenchen and head of the ATARI Lab (AI Planning in Dynamic Environments): Majid grew up in Iran, wasn’t a tech kid (he just wanted to play soccer), and somehow ended up leading the dynamics and control team that built”
https://x.com/IlirAliu_/status/2080277248553390376
What does trillion-scale agentic RL look like on the inference side? @PrimeIntellect’s prime-rl 0.6.0 runs it on vLLM … FP8, wide expert parallelism, prefill/decode disaggregation, KV cache offloading (native + Mooncake), and vllm-router … to train GLM-5 on SWE tasks at 131k”
https://x.com/vllm_project/status/2080297896856186945
Introducing the Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS. Our latest text-to-speech model, in two flavors: • Flash: real-time interaction • Plus: high-quality generation What’s new: • Fine-grained inline tags-steer [whisper], [angry], [breaths] & [laughs] • Free-style natural-language”
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2080270065547809133
Alibaba open-sources its AI chip software stack at WAIC, targeting Nvidia’s CUDA lock-in
https://thenextweb.com/news/alibaba-t-head-sail-open-source-nvidia-cuda-alternative
Qwen
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-image-3.0
Introducing Fugu-Cyber: an update to our Fugu orchestration model. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world security benchmarks, matching cyber-focused frontier models like GPT-5.5-Cyber and Mythos Preview.
https://t.co/5Nh1eBPhHg 🐡”
https://x.com/SakanaAILabs/status/2079367107272405069
I feel like my timeline was right and now it is 3.5 months later. Assuming the Chinese government will still be okay with releasing open Mythos-class models & that Mythos-class models are as risky as the US and UK say, CISO offices do not have too much longer to prepare.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2079030868413182298
Kimi K3, like Claude, loves drowned cities, ancient apocalypses, and vast dying gods.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2078345174334181381
Introducing FLUX 3. One multi-modal model for Image, Video, Audio and Action-Prediction. Creations are truer to life in every kind of style. FLUX 3 Video is now available in early access (link below). Jointly trained in one unified architecture, our model can be extended to”
https://x.com/bfl_ai/status/2080308988961554582
A Chinese company just revealed this autonomous robot toilet It literally drives itself to you when you summon it by voice or remote What a time to be alive”
https://x.com/rowancheung/status/2079230632534933961
DeepSeek’s Huawei-Chip Training Claim Gets Its Benchmarks
https://www.implicator.ai/deepseeks-huawei-chip-training-claim-finally-gets-its-benchmarks-and-its-doubters/
Kimi K3 is a very good model, but people are overindexing on an Arena score again (remember Llama 4?) ELO scores as judged by Arena users are limited, and front-end is like text chat, relatively easy to train/system prompt to a state that people prefer when it is subjective.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2077969350573572490
We analyzed Kimi K3 Max vs. GPT 5.6 Sol Max for software engineering tasks using DeepSWE. Kimi K3 Max matches GPT 5.6 Sol Max at ~55% of the price. Interestingly – used together, the two models deliver a ~16% performance lift. More insights in the thread! 👇”
https://x.com/togethercompute/status/2080054904328986999
A lot of swift conclusions are being drawn about Kimi K3 based on fairly saturated benchmarks and ELOs, rather than actually testing it on very hard problems. The AI frontier has already moved so far that a good model that is a still months behind looks like the future to many.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2078129219691798953
Though I would suspect that models like Kimi K3 & GLM-5.2 would also qualify, this is the first time that an open model has reported gold-medal level status at the IMO, which was a rather big threshold when it was crossed last year by (then unreleased) closed models.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2079944833599156569
TSMC is accelerating Arizona fab buildout to capitalize on AI demand: CFO
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/20/tsmc-arizona-fab-capacity-ai-chip-demand.html
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in His Own Words: 64 Quotes from DeepSeek’s Investor Call
https://www.geopolitechs.org/p/deepseek-founder-liang-wenfeng-in
Moonshot AI Plans Hong Kong IPO After Kimi K3 Model Debut
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/moonshot-ai-plans-hong-kong-123000193.html
Xynova (Hangzhou-based dexterous-hand startup) closed a 500M yuan (~$70M) Series A+. Led by Meituan. Other notable investors: Xiaomi, NIO Capital, and China Merchants Capital. That’s 4 rounds in under 2 years, ~1.5B yuan (~$210M) total. I got to visit their Hangzhou office -“
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2078198671406236044
Xynova tour in Hangzhou. The startup is building dexterous hands for humanoids. Their tech lead chatted with us about the 23-DoF hand design, a hybrid-drive approach, tendon durability, and more. Shoutout to @dolylupec for co-hosting the interview. @Xynovaofficial_ @XRoboHub”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2079603068526907584
remarkable Moonshot is the first model that threatens *spending* on Western closed source, not just token volume. That’s because it’s expensive, verbose and yet great.”
https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/2079839053483033051
A Chinese AI startup is about to hit $1bn in sales while giving its best models away for free
https://thenextweb.com/news/a-chinese-ai-startup-is-about-to-hit-1bn-in-sales-while-giving-its-best-models-away-for-free
Kimi K3 hit a GPU limit That’s why we saw its sellout that says a lot about where the real bottlenecks are Model capability (yesterday) → Compute/GPUs (today) → Permission (next?)”
https://x.com/TheTuringPost/status/2079727735530815953
Jensen Huang: “I think the technology is ready and it could be useful, so I really do hope somebody in Japan creates the world’s most lovable humanoid robot again.” News from Japan this week: amid soaring memory prices, NVIDIA introduced smaller Jetson Thor modules. New Jetson”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2078289582420803693
China’s Z.AI Completes 1-Gigawatt AI Data Center Using Only Chinese-Made Chips
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/chinas-z-ai-completes-1-205515769.html
Z.AI to Use Only Chinese AI Chips at New Giant Data Center – Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-20/z-ai-completes-giant-data-center-with-chinese-chips-to-train-ai
Laguna S 2.1 Released: Cheaper than Deepseek v4 Flash, Better than V4 Pro : r/LocalLLaMA
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1v2pg99/laguna_s_21_released_cheaper_than_deepseek_v4/
And now from the Chinese government side. This would be a good time for cooperation between the US and China to establish common testing/acceptance standards for new models, so at least the safety certification side of model releases can be transparent for open & closed models.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2079437066585202824
I have no inside information, but every sign so far is that there is growing tension about open weights models between the US & China: the US announcing that they reserve the right to act against distilled models, then saying Kimi distills. Contradictory reports from China, etc.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2080002340497568118
Didn’t they literally get hacked by a company who has a monopoly on the model and stopped them from using that model to defend themselves, and then they needed to use an open source chinese model to defend?”
https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/2079959723697111269
We need clarity about what sorts of threats the government is worried about. To what extent is this just intended as an industrial policy & to what extent is it based on a real security risk? The investment going into building on top of Chinese open models is huge, stakes are big”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2079215382242455918
This is all interesting but specifically, I, too, am curious about this. The US & UK clearly see the models being released today from the closed labs as presenting genuine cyber risk (as well as offensive capabilities), it is interesting that China does not seem to believe that.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2078191705585553717
拡散言語モデルの協調による推論時スケーリングの実現 #ICML2026 に採択された私たちの論文 “UnMaskFork: Test-Time Scaling for Masked Diffusion via Deterministic Action Branching” は、複数の拡散言語モデルを協調させることで、コーディングや数学の能力を向上できることを示しました。”
https://x.com/SakanaAILabs/status/2079710010305872138
Kimi K3 has become the #3 most used open weights model in ClinePass, going from 0% → 16% token usage in 3 days. This is the fastest climb we’ve seen in open weights usage in Cline’s history.”
https://x.com/cline/status/2080038876929024463
Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it. Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity. To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we’re temporarily pausing new subscriptions and”
https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2078855608565207130?s=20
Kimi K3 needs at least 64 accelerators to deploy. Most people will never run it themselves. But its weights, outputs, and ideas can still shape future models ‒ as Kimi K2.5’s synthetic data helped train @thinkymachines Inkling (one of the biggest US open-weight models) So”
https://x.com/TheTuringPost/status/2079024757031174503
The secret Trump administration battle to fight Chinese AI
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi
When I asked Kimi K3 “I want you to suggest two poems that you think apply to the current state of GenAI models like you. Don’t just pick popular poems. Think hard” the CoT was 32 pages long (& interesting):
https://t.co/LBPidB5g8a Also typical of K3, lots of looping & dead ends”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2078719596849189323
On Kimi K3: Its Capabilities And Related Discontents | Don’t Worry About the Vase
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2026/07/20/on-kimi-k3-its-capabilities-and-related-discontents/
Interestingly, when I made a request in Chinese for Kimi K3 to pick two non-cliched poems that apply to LLMs, 95.5% of the characters (88% of the words) in the chain-of-thought were in English, even when it was explicitly considering Chinese poems for a Chinese reader.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2078621842508587318
Kimi K3’s Design Secret may be in its Thinking Traces
https://notes.designarena.ai/kimi-k3s-design-secret-may-be-in-its-thinking-traces/
There are no frontier open weights models that are not made in China, and there is no incentive in the US, nor appetite in the EU, to build one – it is a lot of cost, little value capture (There are solid mid-level models, of course, but nothing close to a Kimi K3 or a GLM-5.2)”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2079285757991068119
They really did it! I’m so happy to see this being published. Now we have GLM-5.2 with vision. Putting those B300s to good use. Thank you Baseten, I am porting this to the hybrid now.”
https://x.com/0xSero/status/2080040479337357524
I support open-source models distilling what commercial companies distilled for free from the entire internet. I published distillation for free in 1991 in Europe – this was copied in the US and in China (
https://x.com/SchmidhuberAI/status/2080284349186900162
Super happy to announce @upstageai’ new model, #SolarOpen2. It’s a very good model. Please try it out:”
https://x.com/hunkims/status/2079949203615453414
Robotics @ XIAOMI
https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html
So let me get this straight: a car maker taking apart a rival’s car to develop their new model is fine (Ford did this with Tesla and Chinese EVs) But an AI company inspecting another AI company’s model via prompting and inspecting outputs is a “distillation attack” and not fine?”
https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2080278275109040226
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