Cassidy: Two record-setting open models drop overnight
Cassidy: and Anthropic quietly signs a nineteen-billion-dollar power lease in Kentucky — guess which one most feeds will lead with.
Cassidy: This is the AI Daily Briefing.
Cassidy: Today: who actually owns the weights when the biggest open model comes out of China
Cassidy: and whether a seventeen-times revenue multiple survives a second look.
Bill: Hit follow and you won't have to come looking for the next episode.
Cassidy: Michael Nuñez, writing in VentureBeat:
Quote: Moonshot AI the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup backed by Alibaba
Quote: on Thursday released Kimi K3— a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that the company says is now the largest open-source AI model in the world
Quote: and one that benchmarks show performs neck-and-neck with the most powerful proprietary systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Bill: Kimi K3 — largest open-source model ever, weights out in the open, from Moonshot in Beijing.
Bill: The parameter count's the headline, but that's not the part I'm watching.
Bill: Now the weights themselves come with the provenance problem.
Bill: Earlier this week it was where the compute physically sits.
Bill: Now it's: the biggest open model on the planet was trained by a lab, on a stack, in a jurisdiction outside U.S.
Bill: reach — and you're downloading it into production.
Cassidy: And notice what's missing.
Cassidy: VentureBeat's got 'rivaling top U.S.
Cassidy: systems' in the headline — where's the technical report?
Cassidy: Big parameter claim, release-day splash, no paper I can find.
Cassidy: Same playbook, just faster.
Cassidy: 'Open weights' sounds like transparency until you remember public weights and a documented training process are two completely different
Cassidy: things.
Bill: Right — you can run it without ever knowing what went into it.
Bill: That's a weird definition of open.
Cassidy: Here's Jordan Novet at CNBC:
Quote: That’s boosting cloud startup Fireworks, which competes with Amazon and Google to host models that developers can weave into applications.
Quote: The Nvidia-backed company said Thursday that it has exceeded $1 billion in annualized revenue
Quote: five times what it had last year
Quote: and it has now raised a $1.5 billion round at a $17.5 billion valuation.
Bill: Finally a number I can trust this week.
Bill: Fireworks at a billion in annualized revenue, five times last year — that's a P&L line, not a slide deck.
Cassidy: And it's the story I've been circling all week — the weights are open, the stack running them absolutely is not.
Cassidy: Fireworks is the tollbooth.
Bill: But look at the multiple.
Bill: Seventeen-and-a-half billion on one billion ARR — that's 17x revenue.
Bill: I want to know how much of that billion is Cursor or Cursor-like customers versus real diversification.
Cassidy: Right, they used to get over half their revenue from Cursor alone.
Cassidy: Qiao says they've spread it out — but 'diversified' from one customer to how many?
Cassidy: Three? The round doesn't answer that.
Bill: And the tailwind is CFOs, not engineers.
Bill: Finance execs got the frontier-model bill and told their teams to go find open alternatives.
Bill: Fireworks is selling anxiety relief.
Cassidy: Which is why the Kimi K3 piece we just hit matters here — the biggest open model ever drops, and somebody's got to run it in production.
Cassidy: That somebody bills $1 billion a year.
Cassidy: Data Center Frontier, with David Chernicoff:
Quote: TeraWulf has secured one of the largest dedicated artificial intelligence infrastructure leases announced to date
Quote: signing Anthropic to a 20-year
Quote: $19 billion agreement for approximately 401 MW of critical IT capacity at the company’s Justified Data campus in Hawesville Kentucky.
Cassidy: Twenty years, 401 megawatts, nineteen billion dollars, in Hawesville, Kentucky.
Cassidy: This is the most concrete infrastructure commitment Anthropic has ever put its name on
Cassidy: and it comes one day after we walked through Ode as their services play.
Cassidy: So put that together: a services arm, Claude as the model, and now a dedicated compute campus locked in through the mid-2040s.
Cassidy: That's a very different animal from the safety lab that used to send us position papers.
Bill: And notice what TeraWulf's doing to get there fast — converting a dead aluminum smelter.
Bill: The heavy electrical gear is already in the ground, so they skip years of greenfield permitting.
Bill: That's the only reason late-2027 is even a plausible date.
Bill: They're also dumping their Texas JV stake for about 530 million dollars to fund stuff they own outright.
Bill: Twenty-year contracted revenue is beautiful on a deck — but can a bitcoin-miner-turned-landlord actually deliver 401 megawatts of AI-grade
Bill: capacity on schedule?
Cassidy: The Meta move I flagged Monday — own the campus, own the chips, own the weights — now you can trace the same shape at Anthropic.
Cassidy: Different actor, same vertical grab.
Cassidy: This one's from Unite.AI:
Quote: Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling
Quote: its first general-purpose artificial intelligence model
Quote: giving developers access to a nearly one-trillion-parameter system that can process text
Quote: images and audio. The July 15
Quote: 2026 launch represents the most significant product milestone yet for the heavily funded AI company founded by former OpenAI Chief
Quote: Technology Officer Mira Murati.
Bill: Inkling — Mira Murati's first shipped product.
Bill: 975 billion parameters total
Bill: but here's the part that actually matters: it's a sparse Mixture-of-Experts
Bill: so only 41 billion light up per token.
Bill: So the near-trillion headline is basically a marketing number.
Bill: I want to know whether 41 billion active parameters fit an enterprise inference budget, or if this is a research flex nobody runs at scale.
Cassidy: And it drops the same day as Kimi K3
Cassidy: which we just covered — two enormous open-weight models in one window
Cassidy: and neither one showed up with a technical report I can point you to.
Cassidy: But the interesting move is the packaging.
Cassidy: Apache 2.0 weights on Hugging Face; fine-tune it on their own Tinker platform.
Cassidy: Download it free, then pay to shape it — the weights are open, the stack around them very much isn't.
Bill: Right, that's the Fireworks trade from one story ago, just wearing a lab coat.
Bill: Public weights, monetized inference and training layer.
Bill: The business model is the same.
Cassidy: And Murati's positioning it as the customizable foundation — not the most capable model in the world.
Cassidy: Which is a smart thing to say when you haven't published the benchmarks to prove otherwise.
Cassidy: KWXX writes:
Quote: A function of AI referred to as “deepfake” technology
Quote: enables the realistic digital imitation of an individual’s voice
Quote: face likeness and performance.
Quote: Deepfake technology has been linked to identity theft
Quote: fraud election interference
Quote: cyberbullying and non-consensual pornography
Quote: causing irreparable damage and lasting harm.
Bill: Hawaii's Governor Green signed an AI safety bill yesterday, HB 2137, alongside a dementia care package.
Bill: And the framing I actually care about: the AI measure got signed in the same ceremony as a bill targeting a disease that hits 31,000
Bill: residents — and that number
Bill: the state says doubles by 2050.
Cassidy: Right and here's what I keep watching with state-level AI bills — which problem is this one actually solving: deepfakes
Cassidy: data privacy or algorithmic decisions in something like Medicaid eligibility?
Cassidy: The excerpt cuts off right at HB 2137, so we don't yet know.
Bill: That's the tell, though.
Bill: A state with $309 million in annual dementia-related Medicaid costs is exactly where AI shows up in production — eligibility screening
Bill: care coordination. If the safety bill doesn't reach that, it mostly targets the scary demo while missing the actual deployment.
Cassidy: And it lands the same day we're talking about near-trillion-parameter open models and a $17.5 billion inference company.
Cassidy: Fifty states writing fifty different definitions of 'AI protection' while the compute stack consolidates in Kentucky.
Cassidy: Guess which one moves faster.
Bill: The one with a P&L. Hawaii's got three million dollars appropriated for the memory network — Fireworks does that in ARR before lunch.
Cassidy: If you follow the policy and power struggles behind AI
Cassidy: check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch — a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD over Claude
Cassidy: military AI use autonomous weapons
Cassidy: and procurement blacklisting.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: What we’re watching next: initial capacity under TeraWulf’s Anthropic lease is expected to be operational by late 2027.
Cassidy: If you want to dig deeper on anything we covered today, you’ll find links to every story in the show notes.
Cassidy: Follow the threads that caught your ear.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.