Neill Blomkamp, best known for directing "District 9," has released "Nightborne," his first short film generated entirely by AI. The 13-minute sci-fi horror piece was built from scratch using the Seedance 2.0 video generation model, with Blomkamp directing frame by frame through text prompts. Shot in a documentary style, the film follows a U.S. pilot presumed dead and a secret military program that sends fallen soldiers back into combat.
The faces and voices of 32 real people were used under licensing agreements, and human artists created the concept art. Blomkamp said on X that he now plans to shoot a full-length feature film in the same format. He also founded Barley Studios, a new AI film studio that succeeds Oats Studios, which makes traditional films.
Microsoft plans to use more AMD AI chips in its Azure cloud. The expanded partnership centers on AMD's new Helios platform, which is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2026. Helios is designed to run large AI models and give Azure customers an alternative to Nvidia's dominant GPU systems. AMD CEO Lisa Su called the partnership a major milestone. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said customers need more choices for AI infrastructure. Nvidia still has considerable pricing power, but it faces growing competition from AMD and custom TPUs made by other companies.
AMD could also land another major customer. A public GitHub profile belonging to an AMD director suggests that Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is testing AMD hardware. According to SemiAnalysis, AMD gave Anthropic its highest priority rating, putting it on par with major customers such as Meta. Anthropic is still testing the hardware. AMD may confirm the partnership at its upcoming "Advancing AI" conference if its engineering team resolves the remaining concerns about software quality. OpenAI also has a partnership with AMD.
The Trump administration is reportedly weighing measures targeting Chinese AI models, from adding Chinese labs to sanctions lists to holding U.S. companies liable for security failures. Rather than impose an outright ban, Washington could use soft rules to deter adoption while protecting the market positions of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
So much for the idea that open source cuts computing needs. Moonshot, the AI startup behind the Kimi K3 model, has temporarily stopped selling new subscriptions. Over the past 48 hours, "demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity," the company announced on X about its recently released Kimi K3 model.
Current subscribers aren't affected, and new slots will open up again gradually. Moonshot also announced that it's splitting its subscription model into two tiers. Going forward, a "Kimi Membership" will cover web, app, and work features, while a separate "Kimi Code Membership" will handle programming workflows. The company says it wants to spread computing power more evenly and keep the user experience stable.
Meanwhile, competitor Alibaba is already pushing its rival model, Qwen 3.8, which will be open weight for the first time in a while. A paid but heavily discounted preview version is already available.
Alibaba has unveiled Qwen 3.8, its latest open-weight model with 2.4 trillion parameters. The Qwen team says it matches frontier models and trails only Fable 5. A preview is available through Alibaba's Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork at 10 percent of the standard price. Open weights are coming "soon."
Alibaba says Qwen 3.8 should outperform Qwen 3.7-Max, especially in coding and complex productivity tasks such as full-stack development, data analysis, and office workflows. Developer Shuai Bai says it's also the team's first multimodal model with more than 1 trillion parameters and can process images, videos, and documents. No benchmark results are available yet.
Qwen's push is likely partly aimed at disrupting Kimi K3's momentum. Moonshot AI has promised open weights, but access currently runs through its chat app and API, turning interest into customers. Qwen's release could disrupt that strategy. After reaching $300 million in annual recurring revenue in June, Moonshot plans to go public in as little as six months, Bloomberg reports.
Google Deepmind’s GenCeption repurposes a video generator for classic vision tasks such as depth estimation and segmentation, matching state-of-the-art systems with far less training data. The model trained almost entirely on synthetic videos. Its results add to the debate over whether video generators already contain a kind of universal world model.
Moonshot's AI model Kimi K3 is getting a lot of attention in the Western AI community. The big question is how close it actually gets to the best Western models. Two new data points paint a mixed picture. In the Code Arena: Frontend benchmark, which ranks models based on human preference ratings, Kimi K3 scores 1,679, beating Claude Fable 5 (1,631), GPT-5.6 Sol (1,618), and every other tested model by a wide margin. It's the first time a Chinese model has claimed the top spot on this benchmark.
The picture looks different for hard math. According to data from Epoch AI, Kimi K3 hits only about 39 percent accuracy on FrontierMath Tier 4, the benchmark's hardest expert-level math tasks. Models from OpenAI and Anthropic score close to 90 percent there in some cases.
Kimi K3 falls well behind top Western models on complex math tasks. | Image: Epoch AI
Epoch AI tested three leading AI text detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, and Originality.ai) using style-imitated texts. Up to 18 percent of AI-generated passages went undetected. For scientific writing, the miss rate climbed as high as 48 percent, the very genre where these detectors likely see the most real-world use.
