Is the new Gemini truly outrageous?

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Alphabet drops new Gemini models: Google unveiled a fresh line-up of Gemini models this week, including Gemini 3.6 Flash (for coding, multi-model and knowledge work), Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber (for detecting and patching software vulnerabilities), and 3.5 Flash-Lite (the fastest and lowest-cost model in the 3.5 family). For now, 3.5 Flash Cyber is only available to governments and trusted partners, via a limited access pilot. While 3.5 Flash Lite was designed specifically with a lower price point in mind, all of the releases use fewer tokens at a lower cost than prior releases in the Gemini family, a sign Google has been paying close attention to the rush toward Chinese open source alternatives. Their introductory blog post specifically notes that 3.6 Flash consumes 17% fewer output tokens than its predecessor, 3.5 Flash. They’re also promoting the models’ “reduced verbosity,” which also bakes in compute savings. The launch arrived one day before Alphabet announces its Q2 2026 earnings on Wednesday, July 22. It’s potentially meant as a face-saving response to a Bloomberg report last week, which claimed Alphabet has delayed the release of its Gemini 3.5 Pro model due to disappointing performance, particularly around coding tasks.
Microsoft expands Mistral partnership: The US hyperscaler signed a (purposefully vague") “multibillion-dollar” commitment to team with the French AI company on a collection of European data centers. Mistral has been at the center of European attempts to bolster regional AI innovation, particularly at a time when the US government is opting to more tightly regulate new releases from domestic labs. Additionally, as the European Commission considers classifying Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform as a “gatekeeper” that could stifle competition, Microsoft has pledged to increase its data center capacity across the European Union. As part of the new deal, Microsoft will offer access to Mistral’s top models Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 via its Foundry and Copilot platforms.
SkyPilot brings in $20M in seed funding: The new startup — from Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica and former staffer Zongheng Yang — is a GPU orchestration layer connecting AI companies to cloud providers renting out compute. As Stoica and Yang discovered while building out Databricks, every decent-sized AI lab is calling five, ten or even more cloud providers every day just to keep up with their GPU demands, a process that’s both “painful and expensive.” Their solution is not to amass even more compute, but to ensure that companies are getting more efficiency and productivity out of the GPUs for which they’re already paying. The key for SkyPilot is neutrality: they’ve joined forces with the major hardware and cloud vendors, rather than butting heads with them directly.

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China’s Moonshot and its Kimi K3 model have become a fixation for the global AI industry, to the point that the company had to pause accepting new subscribers for fear of running out of compute. Enterprises have shifted from relying on the latest models from frontier closed-source AI labs over to Moonshot and other Chinese open source alternatives so eagerly, and with such intensity, the US government is mulling a ban — hard or soft — against Chinese open source models entirely. Just to keep OpenAI and Anthropic in the race!

So it’s perhaps not shocking that Moonshot is taking this moment to raise all the additional funding it can, prior to a planned public listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Bloomberg reports that, once the company completes its current round of fundraising at a $31.5 billion valuation, it plans to “immediately open discussions with potential backers about a follow-on capital-raising,” taking the valuation up to $50 billion. I mean, when you’re hot, you are hot.

Meanwhile, another long-time T500 “are they still a private company?!” favorite — newsletter and content creator platform Substack — has added a new AI detection tool, helping readers gauge how much of the material they’re reading was penned by AI. The tool works across the Web and iOS (with Android support coming soon), and will evaluate any chunk of text longer than 100 words.

While AI use continues to explode, the creator-centric platform has taken a relatively cynical view of the technology. Their blog post announcing the new tool — created in partnership with Pangram — specifically calls out LinkedIn as a worst case scenario for user-generated content sites getting overwhelmed with slop. (The ‘Stack also dubs the use of AI-generated content to create human connection as “Claudefishing.”) But they haven’t yet gone Full Doomer; the platform has also introduced a space where creators can write a statement explaining their process, and if/how they’ve decided to integrate AI tools. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2314: Ent founder Brandon Dixon joins the pod to explain why the traditional cybersecurity process — which cleans up a system after a breach has occurred — is backwards. He’s designed an AI agent that lives on everyone’s corporate laptop, and keeps an eye out for risky clicks and potential leaks before they cause a problem. PLUS Clawra creator David Im returns to the show with Sume’s Avatar, a multi-model orchestration layer that he claims can one-shot your AI generated videos without the endless slot machine-style trial and error.

E2313: Science fiction is full of surgery-bots, and Andromeda Surgical is hoping to bring this dream into reality (preferably in a less troubling way than that one scene in “Prometheus.”) CEO Nick Damiano stops by the show to explain why the company is focusing on software, and relying on off-the-shelf robot arms from Germany to actually complete the procedures. Plus Mogul co-founder/CEO Alex Blackwood shows Jason how his platform allows anyone to buy fractional shares of rental homes for as low as $250, benefitting from monthly dividends and appreciation without having to become a landlord.

E2312: Hustle Fund’s Eric Bahn and Chapter One’s Jeff Morris Jr. join our venture capital roundtable directly following the news that Stripe wants to buy PayPal. The possible transaction highlights how little interest today’s leading startups have in going public any time soon. With host Alex Wilhelm, Bahn and Morris dug into when startups should burn the boats à la Fin, physical AI as the next frontier, the power of Silicon Valley groupthink, and how startups are approaching the first days of widespread, company-specific AI evals!

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