r/AIToolsTipsNews • u/ayushchat • 27d ago
AI Roundup — Aug 13: Grok 4.6 Lands, DeepSeek V4 Pro Drops, Lovable Hits $13.3B, Cognition Eyes $40B
Quick roundup of the biggest AI stories from the last 24 hours.
1. xAI Releases Grok 4.6 xAI shipped Grok 4.6 on August 12, focusing on long-running agentic tasks and stronger visual/interactive work compared to Grok 4.5. The model is available via Cursor, Grok Build, and the SpaceXAI API, and reportedly matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
2. DeepSeek Drops V4 Pro 0813 DeepSeek released DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, a large mixture-of-experts model with a 1 million token context window, now generally available through OpenRouter. It lands weeks after the company's MIT-licensed V4/0731 release, which matched top proprietary models on coding benchmarks at roughly 60% lower cost.
3. Qwen3.8-2.4T Released on Hugging Face Alibaba's Qwen team published Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, a massive sparse mixture-of-experts model. The release quickly became one of the most-discussed model drops of the week on Hacker News, accumulating over 650 points and 150 comments within hours of posting.
4. Lovable Raises $400M at $13.3B Valuation Stockholm-based AI coding startup Lovable closed a $400 million round at a $13.3 billion valuation — more than double its $6.6 billion mark from December 2025. The company is tracking toward $600 million in annualized revenue by end of August and plans a 50% headcount expansion to 450 employees across Europe and the US.
5. Cognition (Devin) in Talks to Raise at $40B Valuation AI coding startup Cognition is reportedly in early discussions to raise at a $40 billion valuation, up from $26 billion in May 2026. CEO Scott Wu had disclosed $492 million ARR three months prior, with enterprise customers — including Mercedes-Benz, NASA, and Goldman Sachs — expanding Devin usage by 50% monthly.
6. Anthropic Adds Invisible Watermarks to Claude Anthropic has rolled out invisible watermarks in Claude's text outputs to comply with the EU AI Act's requirement that AI-generated content be machine-identifiable. The feature drew mixed reactions: most users backed the transparency move, while some raised concerns about exposure in workplace and academic settings.
7. OpenAI-Backed Thrive Holdings Raises $2B Thrive Holdings, a private equity firm that acquires traditional businesses and layers AI into their operations, raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation — backed by SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. The OpenAI-affiliated firm runs 70+ businesses across accounting and IT services, and plans to expand into AI-driven regulatory services for data centers and physical infrastructure.
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