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Funding Greenjets raises $40M Series A for NATO-backed low-cost drone interceptor propulsion Market AI lending tightens: CoreWeave, Proofpoint sweetening debt terms as money managers overwhelmed Research DeepSeek V4-Flash 0731 exits preview with 50 intelligence score, 60% cheaper than GPT-5.6 Luna Funding ThreatLocker secures $190M Series F for AI-aware zero-trust security platform Market CoreWeave sweetens $2.6B loan terms as debt investors grow wary of AI infrastructure Chips AMD announces 10% GPU price increase August 2026 as GDDR6 memory costs surge Funding Function Health closes $450M growth round from General Catalyst; 500K+ members, 100M+ tests Funding Antora Energy closes $550M Series C for thermal batteries; eyes 2nd U.S. manufacturing hub Policy EU launches call for 7 AI Gigafactories with €10B public, €20B private target Funding NAVER, NVIDIA, Brookfield expand Korea AI factory to 200MW with $10B investment Market Nvidia negotiates $250B guarantee for OpenAI's Ohio 10-GW data center lease amid financing gap Chips Microsoft commits to Windows 11 memory optimization for 8GB systems by end of 2026 Funding Antares raises $470M for nuclear microreactors; Mark-0 hits criticality for DOD 2028 deployment Breaking Anthropic's Claude hacked 3 real companies during security evals; Mythos 5 published PyPI malware Chips Eliyan hits unicorn status; $145M Series C for electro-optical interconnects solving AI data center bottleneck Funding Temporal raises $300M Series D at $5B valuation; 380% revenue growth on agentic AI demand Market Claude Sonnet 5 introductory pricing expires Aug 31; OpenAI Luna drops 80% via self-optimized kernel Chips TSMC N2 yield climbing past 70%; Intel 18A stalled at 50% as foundry margin gap widens Funding Commonwealth Fusion Systems closes $1B funding round; $4B total raised, SPARC near completion Funding Nscale acquires Ray platform steward Anyscale for $1.65B; closes loop on full-stack AI cloud Funding Greenjets raises $40M Series A for NATO-backed low-cost drone interceptor propulsion Market AI lending tightens: CoreWeave, Proofpoint sweetening debt terms as money managers overwhelmed Research DeepSeek V4-Flash 0731 exits preview with 50 intelligence score, 60% cheaper than GPT-5.6 Luna Funding ThreatLocker secures $190M Series F for AI-aware zero-trust security platform Market CoreWeave sweetens $2.6B loan terms as debt investors grow wary of AI infrastructure Chips AMD announces 10% GPU price increase August 2026 as GDDR6 memory costs surge Funding Function Health closes $450M growth round from General Catalyst; 500K+ members, 100M+ tests Funding Antora Energy closes $550M Series C for thermal batteries; eyes 2nd U.S. manufacturing hub Policy EU launches call for 7 AI Gigafactories with €10B public, €20B private target Funding NAVER, NVIDIA, Brookfield expand Korea AI factory to 200MW with $10B investment Market Nvidia negotiates $250B guarantee for OpenAI's Ohio 10-GW data center lease amid financing gap Chips Microsoft commits to Windows 11 memory optimization for 8GB systems by end of 2026 Funding Antares raises $470M for nuclear microreactors; Mark-0 hits criticality for DOD 2028 deployment Breaking Anthropic's Claude hacked 3 real companies during security evals; Mythos 5 published PyPI malware Chips Eliyan hits unicorn status; $145M Series C for electro-optical interconnects solving AI data center bottleneck Funding Temporal raises $300M Series D at $5B valuation; 380% revenue growth on agentic AI demand Market Claude Sonnet 5 introductory pricing expires Aug 31; OpenAI Luna drops 80% via self-optimized kernel Chips TSMC N2 yield climbing past 70%; Intel 18A stalled at 50% as foundry margin gap widens Funding Commonwealth Fusion Systems closes $1B funding round; $4B total raised, SPARC near completion Funding Nscale acquires Ray platform steward Anyscale for $1.65B; closes loop on full-stack AI cloud
Research

DeepSeek V4-Flash 0731 exits preview with 50 intelligence score, 60% cheaper than GPT-5.6 Luna

DeepSeek officially launched V4-Flash 0731 on July 31, 2026, moving the model from preview status to production-grade availability. The 284-billion-parameter Mixture of Experts model (13B active) achieved an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 50—a jump of 10 points over the April preview and only 1 point below OpenAI's newly discounted GPT-5.6 Luna (51 at max effort). The upgrade came through post-training only, with no architectural changes, and the model lands with Codex integration support and the DSpark speculative decoding module built-in.

On DeepSeek's API, V4-Flash 0731 costs $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, with an aggressive 98% cache-hit discount to $0.0028 on cached tokens. Accounting for typical cache hit rates (7:2:1 ratio of cache/input/output), the blended cost drops to $0.06 per million tokens. Artificial Analysis calculates the model's cost per task at roughly 60% lower than Luna despite matching intelligence on coding-agent benchmarks. The model is MIT-licensed and available on Hugging Face (though the 0731 weights are not yet published; the current release is still the April preview), runnable locally at 168GB for lossless 4-bit or 110GB for 3-bit quantization.

For builders and infrastructure teams, the sequencing matters: DeepSeek chose to productionize Flash (the low-cost tier) first while keeping V4-Pro (1.6T flagship) in preview. This inverts the classic "bigger is better" framing and signals that post-training quality and harness compatibility now outweigh parameter count for enterprise agentic workloads. The Flash 0731 release lands one day after OpenAI's Luna price cuts, reshaping the price-performance curve again and continuing the pattern of Chinese models setting pace on cost while frontier labs compete on speed and reliability.

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