Monday 3 August 2026
Top stories today:
Qwen3.8-Max debuts as Alibaba’s most capable AI model
OpenAI says its models now top 1B users, 2M businesses
Index Ventures raises $2B across venture, seed, growth funds
AstraZeneca in $400B merger talks with U.S. rival Bristol Myers
Amazon +15%, biggest gain since Apr. 2012, on AWS growth
0. Data & Calendar
All values as of 6 AM ET / 3 AM PT, other than S&P500 and NASDAQ close (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).
All times are ET.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. Qwen3.8-Max debuts as Alibaba’s most capable AI model, rivaling Kimi K3
Qwen3.8-Max has trailed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 and Kimi K3 on Arena.ai’s Frontend Code Arena leaderboard:
Priced at $2/$6 per 1M input/output tokens, vs. Kimi K3’s $3/$15, Claude Opus 5’s $5/$25, and GPT-5.6 Sol’s $10/$45.
Next week: Qwen3.8-Max open weights to be released.
2.4T parameters (95B active) in size.
Alibaba shares +7.3%, the biggest gain in nearly a month, on the announcement.
Separately, Moonshot reportedly secured ~20K NVIDIA chips from Alibaba under a computing agreement.
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3. OpenAI says its models now top 1B users, 2M businesses
The announcement comes after OpenAI slashed prices of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra 20%.
Separately, OpenAI’s internal model Astra produced results on 10 math and quantum complexity problems, the company said.
Astra was reportedly previewed to policymakers and regulators in Washington last week.
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5. Index Ventures raises $2B in new capital across venture, seed, growth funds
Wiz’s $32B sale to Google and Figma’s IPO are among recent hits in Index’s portfolio.
Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral are among Index’s AI bets.
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7. AstraZeneca said to be in $400B merger talks with U.S. rival Bristol Myers
AstraZeneca’s market value is ~$246B, vs. Bristol Myers Squibb’s $133.4B:
The talks could yield a deal soon, but may also be delayed or fall apart.
AstraZeneca shares -7% in early Mon. trading, while Bristol Myers Squibb rose as much as 3.8% premarket.
