7/31: Leopold Survives
New info on Situational Awareness, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, MiniMax H3, Seedance 2.5, new OpenAI model, New York sues Kalshi
It’s Friday again. Another crazy week in the singularity, where fortunes are created and destroyed in the span of days. Be sure to catch us live on X and YouTube, and follow us on Instagram.
Today’s Experts
Bijan Tavassoli (independent)
Ahmad Osman (Osmantic)
Simon Lermen (MATS)
Matt Parlmer (General Fabrication Co.)
Karina Nguyen (Thoughtful)
Today’s Situations
New information on Leopold and Situational Awareness. SALP peaked at $45B under management in July before declines in chip stocks caused the firm’s highly leveraged bets to unwind, forcing Aschenbrenner to sell most of their public assets to Citadel. SALP nearly sold $3.5B of Anthropic stock to Greenoaks and Sequoia before backing out. The firm is left with >$10B in mostly private and some public assets with no margin. On Thursday, Aschenbrenner sent a letter to the firm’s LPs expressing remorse for the firm’s losses but confidence in the thesis, sharing that July returns were -67% but YTD returns were still +80%, crushing the market’s +9.4%. Leopold is getting married this weekend in Carmel to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, at a wedding with a “pre-wedding colloquium to discuss ideas in panels and breakout sessions”.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 is released, a major upgrade to the initial April 24 preview release. It substantially outperforms even DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Preview on almost all benchmarks, and performs similarly to GPT-5.6 Luna and GLM-5.2 on the Artificial Analysis index. It’s an open-weights 284B parameter model (13B active), but text-only. It’s extremely cheap, at just $0.14/$0.28 per million input/output tokens, much less than GPT-5.6 Luna ($0.20/$1.20) and GLM-5.2 ($1.40/$4.40). And it supposedly did all this with just post-training improvements over the original. It’ll be exciting to see the full version of DeepSeek-V4 Pro.
Two new video models: MiniMax H3 and ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5. You can see in the demos that both are extremely good, noticeably better than the prior generation. It’s getting to the point where they can generate totally serviceable TikTok microdramas that don’t feel like AI slop. It’s crazy to see models able to create all of this from a prompt, especially for those of us who remember when the best models could do was this:
OpenAI’s DALL·E (2021) OpenAI shows its new “Astra” model to regulators. Astra is the codename for a new family of models with better ability to complete long-horizon tasks, possibly to be released as GPT-6.
Moonshot is using 20,000 Nvidia Hopper chips provided by Alibaba. Some people alleged that the chips are H200s, subject to US export controls, which Moonshot denied. Alibaba is a major investor in Moonshot. Moonshot also has a way to access Nvidia’s newer Blackwell chips, which could be a violation of US export controls.
New York sues Kalshi for violating state gambling laws, alleging that the prediction market is an illegal gambling platform. The state is seeking a ban on Kalshi operations in the state and $36B of penalties and disgorgement. Kalshi argues that it is a federally licensed exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and thus state regulations are preempted.
Tesla may spin off or sell its China business to merge with SpaceX. Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory manufactures over half of all of its cars globally, and 18% of the company’s revenue comes from China. But SpaceX’s close ties with the government will likely force the companies to re-evaluate if they are to merge.
Semianalysis founder Dylan Patel is raising a $400M fund, SemiAnalysis Capital Fund I. Patel has previously invested in startups like Thinking Machines, Enfabrica, and Fluidstack.
Hyperscalers now have $2.4 trillion in spending commitments. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have a huge amount of purchase commitments, contractual obligations, and uncommenced leases. They have also exceeded $1.1 trillion in total spending since the beginning of 2023.
