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is there no rest for the weary in terms of AI launches Alibaba has released Quin 3.6 plus, its third proprietary closed source AI model, launched within a three day period, saying it drastically enhanced agentic coding. Quoting Bloomberg China's e commerce leader unfurled the agentic AI focused Qin 3.6 on Thursday, days after it trotted out upgrades to an image generation platform and a multimodal model that can understand inputs like voice and images as well as text. All three are closed source, meaning developers cannot download and access its code or adapt the technology to their own purposes. That runs counter to the typical practice of many Chinese developers, including Minimax and Deepseek, which prefer to open up their models to promote usage and adoption. Alibaba's Kwan platforms are among the world's most popular, in part because of their open nature, but the Internet pioneer is now driving a major restructuring aimed at generating income off its sprawling AI efforts. While Alibaba has emphasized it will continue to release open source models, going proprietary in select instances allows Alibaba to retain greater control and charge more users directly. Alibaba's keen to monetize its growing AI portfolio in part to counter weaknesses in its E commerce business, which is grappling with fierce domestic competition. The company is moving to shore up its bottom line in other ways as well. Alibaba in March launched an agentic AI service known as Wukong for company clients and hiked prices for its cloud and storage services by as much as 34%. The latest model, Quinn 3.6 plus, will be integrated with Wukon, the flagship Quinn app and other agentic AI services. End quote. Basically ditto. Quoting VentureBeat Microsoft on Wednesday launched three new foundational AI models it built entirely in house a state of the art speech transcription system, a voice generation engine and an upgraded image crater, marking the most concrete evidence yet that the $3 trillion software giant intends to compete directly with OpenAI, Google and other frontier labs on model development, not just distribution. The Trio of models, MyTranscribe 1, MyVoice 1 and MyImage 2 are available immediately through Microsoft Foundry and a new My Playground. They span three of the most commercially valuable modalities in enterprise AI converting speech to text, generating realistic human voice, and creating images. Together they represent present the opening salvo for Microsoft's superintelligence team, which Mustafa Suleiman formed just six months ago to pursue what he calls AI self sufficiency. The announcement lands at a precarious moment for Microsoft. The company's stock just closed its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, as investors increasingly demand proof that hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure spending will translate into revenue. These models, priced aggressively and positioned to reduce Microsoft's own cost of goods sold, are Suleyman's first answer to that pressure. MyTranscribe1 is the headline release. The Speech to Text model achieves the lowest average word error rate on the Fleurs benchmark, the industry standard multilingual test across the top 25 languages by Microsoft product usage averaging 3.8 wer according to Microsoft's benchmarks. It beats OpenAI's Whisper Large V3 on 25 languages, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash on 22 of 25, and 11 Labs Scribe V2 and OpenAI's GPT Transcribe on 15 of 25 each. Alongside it, MyVoice1 is Microsoft's text to speech model. Capable of generating 60 seconds of natural sounding audio in a single second, the model preserves speaker identity across long form content and now supports custom voice creation from just a few seconds of audio through Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft is pricing it at $22 per 1 million characters. My Image 2, meanwhile, debuted as a top three model family on the Arena AI leaderboard and now delivers at least 2x faster generation times on Foundry and Copilot compared to its predecessor. To understand why these models matter, you have to understand the contractual tectonic shift that made them possible. Until October2025. Microsoft's WITS contractually prohibited from independently pursuing artificial general intelligence. The original deal with OpenAI signed in 2019, gave Microsoft a license to OpenAI's models in exchange for building the cloud infrastructure OpenAI needed. But when OpenAI sought to expand its compute footprint beyond Microsoft striking deals with SoftBank and others, Microsoft renegotiated. As Suleyman explained in December 2025, the revised agreement meant that up until a few weeks ago, Microsoft was not allowed by contract to pursue artificial general intelligence or superintelligence independently. The new terms freed Microsoft to build its own Frontier models while retaining license rights to everything OpenAI builds through 2032. End quote. Time for the weekend. Longreach suggestions for reasons I will explain in a second. But first up, there's been a lot of talk about how AI could enable a billion dollar company to be created with only a handful of employees and maybe one day a solopreneur billion dollar company. Well, quoting the times, Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his startup off the ground. From his house In Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used AI to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website, copy, generate the images and videos for ads, and handle customer service. He created AI systems to analyze his business performance, and he outsourced the other stuff he couldn't do himself. His startup, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP1 weight loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medv's first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales. Mr. Gallacher then hired his only other employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales. A $1.8 billion company with just two employees in the age of AI, it's increasingly possible. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a new breed of super efficient companies in 2024. A one person business worth $1 billion would have been unimaginable without AI he said on a podcast. And now it will happen. Mr. Gallagher, who formerly ran a startup that sold wristwatches, said he thought Mr. Altman's prophecy of a one person, $1 billion company would be a firm that built AI. He was excited when he realized he might have done it, taking an old idea being a middleman for weight loss drugs and using AI to turbocharge it. It's not an AI company, but I did build it with AI, he said. In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech CEO friends over when such would appear, and that he would like to meet the guy who had done it. End quote. And then a second one for you from Bloomberg. How Chess grandmasters are finding new ways to win at chess by making less optimal moves after AI pushed classical chess toward perfect play, breathing new life into the game. It's titled AI Perfected Chess, but humans made it unpredictable again. You know, chess was the first thing that AI tackled, right? So read the implications of this piece into that however you want. So speaking of chess. It was DeepMind that 15 years or so ago, a decade ago, they were carrying the flag from for AI advancements by beating humans at chess at Go, at Atari games at Starcraft. The founder of DeepMind is, of course, Demis Hassabis. And tomorrow's episode is going to be a deep dive discussion about the life of Demis Hassabis. Why? Well, because the kids and I and the wife are all heading out to spring break for vacation at the Grand Canyon. So enjoy basically a biography of Demis Hassabis tomorrow that will double as a sort of history of modern AI. I will be back with you for a regular episode on Monday, but until then, be good, everybody.