🎬 Alibaba's Video Model Tops at a Third of Seedance's Price

Alibaba shipped a video model on Monday that already ranks first in blind viewer voting. Google's Veo is twelfth on the same list and charges double. Hand the thing a PDF or a spreadsheet and it gives back thirty seconds of video with sound. The company lost three quarters of its quarterly profit paying for work like this. Let's dive in!

In today’s insights:

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

Evolving AI: Alibaba built Wan3.0 to turn a PDF or a slide deck into 30 unbroken seconds of video.

Key Points:

ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 runs about $0.59 a second at 1080p through its cheapest providers, and it renders only 480p and 720p natively. Wan3.0 charges $0.20 a second at that resolution, and a launch discount cuts that to $0.14 until September 23. Alibaba Cloud moved the model out of public beta on Monday, and it now runs on Qwen Cloud and Model Studio without an application. The model also takes text, images, audio and video as references, and it recommends a clip length from the prompt itself.

Try Wan 3.0 Now

PowerPoint decks and PDFs are raw material for video now. A small business can test five versions of an ad for the cost of one lunch, and a freelancer can send a client a moving cut of an idea in minutes. The ads and explainers people scroll past are the work of one person with no camera and no crew.

One company has developed a technology that extracts valuable resources from coal without burning it. From jet fuel to diesel and more, Frontieras North America has the potential to address $2.1  trillion in annual markets*.

It’s similar to when John D. Rockefeller commercialized oil refining technology. If Frontieras captures just 2% of the global coal market, they would position themselves as the global leader in the space.

They just broke ground for their $850 million flagship facility and reserved the ‘FASF’ NASDAQ ticker. Don’t miss your chance to join the next phase of growth: invest in Frontieras before the opportunity ends on August 27.

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^{Frontieras is offering securities through the use of an Offering Statement that has been qualified by the Securities and Exchange Commission under Tier II of Regulation A. A copy of the Final Offering Circular that forms a part of the Offering Statement may be obtained from: invest.frontieras.com.  Reservation of the ticker symbol is not a guarantee that we will be listed on the NASDAQ. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.   Sources* The global market for our products is worth a combined value of over $2.1 trillion.}

Evolving AI: The man who signed off on those B300s worked at Nvidia's Taiwan office.

Super Micro sold the 130 servers to Flying Tiger Technology, a Taiwanese trading firm on its approved buyer list. Any order above eight units gets an on site inspection. Prosecutors say that inspection happened in September 2025 at a Taipei building far too small to power 130 servers, and that the defendants then told Nvidia executives it had passed. They want five years for Chang, the distribution manager who approved the release.

Blackwell chips train the largest AI models in the world, and Chinese labs have been stuck a generation behind on hardware. The free Chinese chatbots that millions of people now use for code and writing were built under that limit. None of those chatbots tell you which chips they were trained on.

What actually happens when you talk to AI? Anthropic breaks down how models like Claude generate answers, and why “it just predicts the next word” is technically true, but far from the full story. A useful watch if you want a clearer mental model of how AI really works, where it can go wrong, and how to prompt it better.

Evolving AI: The SEC wants records from four banks on the AI fund that nearly collapsed in July.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America lent the money behind those bets, and the SEC has now subpoenaed all four for the timing of the trades and for what the fund told them about its borrowing, though regulators have accused nobody of wrongdoing. When the brokers demanded cash in late July, Aschenbrenner sold about $16 billion of stock to Citadel at a 10% discount.

Ken Griffin has already sold off most of what Citadel bought, and the chip and data center stocks in that book sit inside the index funds and retirement accounts millions of people own through work. Nobody holding those funds can see how much of that price is borrowed money, and the bank records are the first place regulators will look.

QUICK HITS

🤗 Hugging Face is exploring a sale at $13B or more, nearly triple its 2023 valuation, weeks after an OpenAI model breached its servers.

🎮 General Intuition is raising at a $6B valuation, up from $2.3B weeks ago, as its game-trained model moves into robotics.

☢️ Bill Gates-backed TerraPower will announce its first AI data center reactor this year, with construction starting 2027.

⚖️ OpenAI says California should strengthen its AI safety bill, as opposite is on the way.

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