AI Briefing — Saturday, July 18, 2026

Mayor Mamdani Says Landlords Can't Use AI Images to Advertise

Kimi: Threat or menace?

Chinese company Moonshot AI released a new version of its Kimi model this week, prompting concern about "full AI communism."

Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

Our Approach to Bioresilience: Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind

GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol on an NP-Hard Problem: Does /goal help?

Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out

Neil Rimer, the venture capitalist who co-founded Index Ventures, predicts the historic wealth AI is generating in Silicon Valley will have to be redistributed, voluntarily or involuntarily.

Vertu wants executives to pay $6,880 for an AI agent — here’s how it actually performs

From AI workflows to battery life and security, here's what it's really like to live with Vertu's luxury foldable every day.

Databricks hits $188B valuation, extending its run as AI’s favorite second act

Databricks has remade its image into an AI company and has published research on the cost savings of open weight AI models for coding.

Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard

Agility is opening a new training center for its Digit robots in Fremont, California.

Fine-tune video and image models at scale with NVIDIA NeMo Automodel and 🤗 Diffusers

Newer Models, Same Advantage

Security incident disclosure — July 2026

What building Shippy taught us about building agents

Model Routing Is Simple. Until It Isn’t.

Hierarchical Denoising For Multi-Step Visual Reasoning

Video models are evolving into vision foundation models, yet they still lack human-like multi-step reasoning. Streaming autoregressive diffusion models are efficient but limited in reasoning, while bidirectional diffusi…