Happy Sunday. This week Claude got a major upgrade, China's open models made a real leap, and Google had a rough few days. Here's what actually mattered, broken down so it's worth your five minutes. Let's get into it.
This week in tech + AI
Anthropic dropped Claude Sonnet 5. It's their most agentic model yet and nearly as good as Opus, but way cheaper. What it means: the cheap model today basically matches the expensive one from a few months ago. AI keeps getting better and cheaper, which is great if you build stuff.
China's open-source AI models are catching up fast, and they are free. Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a huge model trained entirely on Chinese chips, and Z ai released GLM-5.2, now rated the strongest openly available model, both under a fully permissive license. What it means: you no longer need a big lab's paid API for near-frontier performance, and a lot of that cheaper alternative is now coming out of China.
Google delayed its big Gemini model again and lost some star researchers. Gemini 3.5 Pro slipped to July while several top people left for OpenAI and Anthropic, and Alphabet lost about $225 billion in value. What it means: even the giants are struggling right now, and in AI the best people basically are the whole game.
The US job market came in way weaker than expected. June added just 57,000 jobs, roughly half what people predicted. What it means: the economy is cooling, which makes a rate cut more likely and usually lifts markets short term. If you follow investing, bad news is good news again.
On my mind
My month traveling through China just came to an end, and it left me with two things I keep thinking about. The first is how much the people around you shape you. I spent 30 days with my close friend Antonije (@mirkovicdev), and we have this dynamic where we constantly push and support each other to go after our most ambitious goals. Being around that every day motivated me more than almost anything else could, and it reminded me that your closest circle kind of sets your ceiling. So be careful who you spend your time with, it matters way more than people admit. The second thing is that as much as I love being free and flexible and travelling around, I realized I actually miss having a home base, a place I can come back to and just lock in for a while. That's something I'm really looking forward to getting back when I move to Zurich soon to start at ETH!! :)
More from me
My latest video: Why high agency might be the most valuable thing you can build in your 20s. Watch here
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Have a great week,
Chris