Alibaba unveiled its largest model yet and promised open weights, while DeepSeek's V4 API pricing and a July 24 deprecation of legacy model names reshape developer choices.
The Alibaba and Tencent backed startup says its largest model yet rivals OpenAI and Anthropic systems, and will release the weights publicly on July 27.
Alibaba's Qwen team released a preview of Qwen3.6-Max, which the company says improves agentic coding and world knowledge as it pushes enterprise adoption of AI agents.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told the World Economic Forum that scaling LLMs alone will not produce scientific breakthroughs, put AGI by 2030 at roughly 50 percent, and said China trails by about six months.
The Information reports DeepSeek's next flagship model is expected around mid-February 2026, with internal tests said to show strong coding performance.
A Wired column says Alibaba's open-weight Qwen models gained ground in real products while GPT-5 and Llama 4 disappointed, pointing to a shift in the AI balance for 2026.
