Inception says Mercury 3, its diffusion LLM, is more than 40 times larger than Mercury 1. It generates 1,068 tokens a second on Nvidia GPUs and has a 1M-token context window. It costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output, half that at launch. The claims that it beats speed-tier models from OpenAI and Anthropic are untested.
Inception
Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120B open-weight model for enterprise agents, and Bolt 74B-A9B, which runs on RTX Spark laptops and DGX Spark. Both target tool use and browsing, and a small E4B model follows this month. Nvidia publishes the datasets and recipes but names no licence.
TechCrunchLong-time Rubyist Paul Battley is archiving all his gems and has stopped work on them. He objects to David Heinemeier Hansson's control of Rails and to large companies mining open source to train models. The post drew more than 500 comments, and it raises a familiar question for dependency trees: who maintains this next year?
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AWS released TorchNeuron, a version of PyTorch that runs existing models on its Trainium chips with one configuration change. Amazon is also sending patches upstream to remove chip-specific code from PyTorch. It is Amazon's most direct attack yet on CUDA's lock-in.
TechCrunch
Jim Keller's Tenstorrent more than doubled its valuation with a $1.5B round led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. Months earlier, Intel and Qualcomm had reportedly circled it at up to $5B. Keller says Galaxy servers running DeepSeek showed it could stay independent. The money goes to chips for serving open-weight and video models.
TechCrunch
Town, founded by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, raised a $108M Series B co-led by Forerunner and Menlo. Every employee gets a "Townie" agent wired into email and calendar. These agents can now talk to each other and share approved information, which makes them a working multi-agent setup inside the company.
TechCrunch
Bloomberg reports that Anthropic and Nscale are close to another $45B compute agreement, about a month after their first. Both companies are heading towards IPOs, and Nscale is reportedly facing investor pushback over a $30B valuation. Neither company has confirmed the deal.
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