Cognition's $10b Series C; Smol AI updates
Cognition raised $400M at a $10.2B valuation to advance AI coding agents, with swyx joining the company. Vercel launched an OSS coding platform using a tuned GPT-5 agent loop. The Kimi K2-0905 model achieved top coding eval scores and improved agentic capabilities with doubled context length. Alibaba released Qwen3-ASR, a multilingual transcription model with robust noise handling. Meta introduced Set Block Decoding for 3-5× faster decoding without architectural changes. Innovations in KV cache compression and quantization were highlighted, including AutoRound in SGLang and QuTLASS v0.1.0 for Blackwell GPUs. Algorithmic benchmarking tools like AlgoPerf v0.6 were updated for efficiency.