The Download

Morning Brew Inc.

TL;DR: Two cheap open-weight AI models dropped in the last 48 hours: Thinking Machines’ Inkling and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 (which is blowing people away). It’s a sign that AI is becoming more of a buyer’s market where consumers can shop around for the best price—and it’s putting the pressure on legacy labs.

What happened: Inkling is the first model from an ex-OpenAI crew led by former CTO Mira Murati. The selling point: While it’s not as capable as the top dogs, it uses just a fraction of its total parameters on a single task to keep it faster and cheaper to run.

Kimi K3, a Chinese model, is more powerful and has been topping some AI leaderboards in testing. It’s the largest open-weight model ever released, with some analysts likening its performance to top US models such as Opus 4.8 (while being about 40% cheaper).

Openly cheap: This may come as a surprise, but the average price of an AI token has actually fallen by about 90% since 2023, as hardware and software improvements made tasks cheaper to run (though high-end models are generally a lot more token-hungry).

It’s easier to take advantage of that price drop with open-weight models, because they can run locally on your own machine or through a variety of third-party cloud providers competing to offer the lowest price. As a bonus, you can fine-tune them more than the closed-weight options from incumbent AI labs, which can also charge a markup because you can only get the models through them.

US labs have a spicier explanation for why some of the most popular Chinese models—many of them open weight—cost so little: They accuse them of distilling proprietary American models to skip the expensive research and training phase.

Uh-oh for US frontier labs?: Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic offer more budget-friendly models, too—but the ones they spend most of their energy promoting are their pricey, cutting-edge flagships (especially ahead of their IPOs). But OpenAI is reportedly weighing big price cuts to draw in more customers, per the Wall Street Journal, and Anthropic has repeatedly kicked the can on switching Fable 5 to costlier usage-based pricing—a sign, perhaps, that it’s worried about attracting enough paying users to its top-tier model.

Bottom line: We’re entering an era where the most attractive AI feature might not be raw capability, but bang for buck. For those who don’t need a top-of-the-line Lambo, there are plenty more good ole reliable Camrys on the lot now. —WK

      

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The Zeitbyte

The Odyssey (AI’s version)

Screenshot via Fountain 0/YouTube

Imagine trying to explain AI slop to Homer. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in theaters today, but if you’d rather wait and watch a computer’s best guess at Greek mythology, there’s Odysseus: The Fall, a fully AI-generated, 135-minute adaptation launching later this summer, from the startup Fountain 0 (watch the teaser here).

The AI movie cost “mid-five figures” to make, according to creator Ash Koosha, which is about five figures too many. None of it appears to have gone toward writing the synopsis—it says the AI film focuses on a drowning man’s fractured memory, “where every monster wears his own handwriting.” (We’re still not sure what that means.) Koosha has openly said he hopes to ride Nolan’s coattails and frames his AI film as a curiosity that might drive people to theaters to compare it to “the ultimate in human creation”—which had a $250 million budget. (Nolan might not be flattered: He recently praised Gen Z for “utterly rejecting” AI slop.)

Nolan’s team, meanwhile, showed off its marketing budget in the form of a 40-foot Trojan horse in the middle of New York for the movie’s US premiere Tuesday. It’s the second-most unhinged flex this season, just falling short of HBO Max flying a massive animatronic dragon over the Tower of London to launch Season 3 of House of the Dragon. —LC

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• If you’ve been waiting for Gemini’s next flagship model to roll out (you know, since it was supposed to arrive last month), we have some bad news for you.
• Tesla fans have been begging for an e-bike. Instead, they got a $225 toddler push-bike that looks like something out of Tron.
• Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI just got bigger: It’s now reportedly sent legal letters to around 40 former employees.
• Did your favorite Netflix show use AI? The company just revealed that gen AI touched about 300 of its titles this year, and it’s naming (some) names.
• Welcome to your AI slop era. Google Vids now lets you generate your own “personal avatar.”
• The world’s first humanoid robot free-combat tournament kicked off in China yesterday, and there are so many weird and wonderful moments in the broadcast—like a robot that kept fighting even after losing its head and one taunting with popular dances.
• Here’s an interesting use of AI: New York’s governor used it to scan every law in the state. It found a $25 fee to take your dog hunting and other weird outdated laws.
• Adding to the list of things no one asked for… a startup’s AI agent will hunt for your next job—and if it lands one, it’ll cost you 20% of your first month’s salary.

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This time last week...

Readers’ most-clicked story was about a $20,000 home robot called NEO getting a new pair of hyper-realistic hands—which let it do things like pluck individual grapes from a bunch, pick up and set down a wine glass, screw in a lightbulb, and use a spray bottle. (Watch the video here.)