howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy friday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

• Open-source AI is catching up to the industry's best models

• Google wants Search to become your AI assistant

• Roblox wants AI to build your next game

• Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

VIKTOR

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40,000+ teams have already hired one. Alpha Signal, one of the biggest AI newsletters, automated 18 workflows in 67 days with no developer. Hampton budgeted $440K for three hires; 44 days after installing Viktor, none of those hires were on the calendar.

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THROUGH THE VALLEY

1/ Open-source AI is catching up to the industry's best models: Moonshot AI just released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weights model with a 1 million-token context window, built for coding, reasoning, research, and long-horizon agent workflows. Early benchmarks place it alongside frontier models like Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, while outperforming them on several coding and software engineering tasks (Kimi K3 announcement)

2/ Google wants Search to become your AI assistant: Google is rolling out connected apps in AI Mode, allowing users to link services like Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music so Search can perform actions across them. The update moves Google closer to turning Search into an AI assistant that can complete everyday tasks instead of simply returning links. (Read the announcement)

3/ Roblox wants AI to build your next game: The company unveiled Build, an AI-powered creation tool that turns text prompts into playable 3D games complete with environments, characters, gameplay mechanics, visuals, and sound. Users can refine projects in Roblox Studio before publishing, marking a major step toward making game development accessible to millions of creators. (Read the announcement)

TRENDING TOOLS

• Aidan > The newest AI employee. The first computer-using AI built for real-time conversations

• Lucy 2.5 > The most advanced Live AI model yet. Edit videos in real time with greater control and new capabilities

• Kimi K3 > Moonshot AI's powerful new open-source foundation model

• Pluto > Learns your story in just 10 minutes, makes you discoverable to AI agents, and connects you with the right people

• Bolt Slides > Lets any AI agent, including Claude Code, Codex, and Bolt, create presentation slides that were previously impossible

• Google Vids > Swap backgrounds, adjust lighting, and clean up messy footage instantly using a simple text prompt

• Fastlane > Enter your website and instantly generate thousands of viral videos to promote your product

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

• xAI sued a Grok user over sexualized deepfakes, testing how model companies may pursue misuse

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

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