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Top stories today:
- Trump announces Japan deal with 15% tariffs, $550B fund pledge
- Alibaba releases Qwen3-Coder, open-weight model for agentic coding
- Elonās xAI said to be in talks to raise up to $12B for AI chips
- OpenAI to reopen $40B round as it seeks more capital from investors
- Meta poaches 3 Google AI researchers behind IMO gold-winning model
0. Data and calendar
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Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing todayās newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. Trump announces Japan deal with 15% tariffs, $550B fund pledge
15% tariffs on Japanese imports to the U.S., including autos.
Japan will also buy 100 Boeing jets, boost rice and agricultural imports, and increase defense spending with U.S. firms.
19% tariffs on the Philippines, the same level as Indonesia agreed and a percentage below Vietnamās 20% baseline level.
Meeting Chinese counterparts in Stockholm next week for the 3rd round of talks, Treasury Secy. Scott Bessent said.
Relatedly, Taiwan is also aiming to strike a trade deal with the U.S. in a fresh round of talks.
Goldman Sachs has forecast 15% as the new baseline tariff, with a 50% levy on copper and critical materials.
2. Alibaba releases Qwen3-Coder, open-weight AI model for agentic coding
Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct has achieved benchmark results comparable to Kimi-K2, Claude Sonnet 4, and GPT-4.1 in Alibabaās internal testing:
480B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, with 35B active parameters.
256K token context length, extendable to 1M tokens via extrapolation methods.
Available for download through Hugging Face and the code is accessible via GitHub.
Alibaba is also open-sourcing its Qwen Code command-line tool for agentic coding.
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4. Elonās xAI said to be in talks with Valor Equity to raise up to $12B for AI chips
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