Fundraising

AIStepFun's Step 5 Preview, a 600B-total, 27B-active MoE model with 1M context and vision, is free to try on Nous Portal for one week. Nous Research says it scored 33.89 on the Hermes Index, the same score as GPT-6 Luna.

AIaccording to a post from Kilo. The model has 600B parameters, with 27B active per token, and supports a 1M-token context and vision.

AIOpenRouter says StepFun's Step 5 Preview is now live on its platform, priced at $1.00 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens. Cache hits are 50% off at launch, bringing them to $0.05 per million, and a week of free access is rolling out across partners including opencode, Cline, Nous Research, and Kilo Code.

AIArchitect Financial Technologies has launched Liquid Inference, an LLM router that auctions each request to providers quoting the requested model, and the lowest qualifying offer wins. Buyers can set per-job cost caps, time-to-first-token limits, minimum throughput, and region or zero-data-retention rules, and the max price is locked before generation. The source states that fees, provider list, and latency data are not yet public.

AIAnthropic is halving the price of cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5 to $0.10 per million tokens. The company says this makes Sonnet 5.5 roughly 20% cheaper to run on most long-running work.

AITogether AI is running a large dedicated inference cluster of NVIDIA B300 GPUs on IBM Cloud, backed by NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, and is the first customer on it. Together AI operates the inference layer, IBM provides the cloud, and NVIDIA supplies the silicon and networking. The companies say the setup aims to deliver enterprise-grade, open-model inference at scale.

AIAlibaba unveiled the Zhenwu V900 AI chip at its 2026 Apsara Conference, claiming three times its predecessor's performance and support for clusters of up to 500,000 cards. The company is pursuing data center capacity beyond 20 gigawatts by 2032 and has committed RMB 380 billion in capital spending over three years.

AIHiggsfield AI announced Seedance 2.5 at 1080p resolution on its API, offering 100% cashback for users. The post links to the Higgsfield API explore page for access details.

AIGrok 4.7 is now available in v0, with 40% off until September 27. The v0 post links to a trial page for the model. The background post describes Grok 4.7 as a notable improvement over Grok 4.6 at the same price and speed.

AIShanghai-based Twoo is building an AI that participates in conversations between two users, sharing context, remembering experiences, and helping them plan activities together rather than serving one person. Founder Cobe Chen says the product's monetization includes in-app "shells" that unlock outfits for its octopus AI character, plus premium memberships for professional uses such as collaborative writing and teaching. The company is preparing overseas expansion into North America, Japan, and South Korea.

AIFactory is now available on the Claude Marketplace, letting enterprise customers apply their committed Anthropic spend toward its autonomous software development platform. The platform automates the software development lifecycle, covering planning, implementation, testing, and security within one system, with enterprise deployment options that keep execution close to customers' code and infrastructure.

AIMeituan's LongCat-2.0 is now available free in Command Code, the AI coding tool. The model has 1.6T parameters, 48B activated, and a 1M-token context window. It is available on all Command Code plans to all subscribers.

AIBridgewater partnered with Thinking Machines on Tinker to fine-tune a model that helps its analysts focus on what matters most. The post frames the work as experts improving AI that empowers experts, with a linked article on replicating expert judgment in financial tasks.