Thursday Morning

Junyang Lin, former lead of Alibaba’s Qwen models, is raising several hundred million dollars for a new AI lab at a valuation around $2 billion. The proposed price, rare for a brand-new Chinese startup, is drawing interest from investors including Gaorong Ventures and HongShan, reflecting strong demand for elite foundation-model talent.

Rerun released version 0.32 with new capabilities that push its open-source tooling beyond visualization into full data pipeline workflows. The update adds disk streaming for its OSS server and a dataset review interface, with a demo ingesting samples from five egoexo-forge datasets including Assembly101, HOCap, HOT3D-Aria, Ego-Dex, and Aria-Gen2.

Andhra Pradesh broke ground on an AMCA-linked aircraft testing and integration facility in Puttaparthi, tying the state to India’s 5th-generation fighter program. The project centers on ADA’s Aircraft Integration & Flight Testing Centre and was launched alongside 12 additional defense and aerospace projects across Rayalaseema on May 15.

The same review found that conventional antibody discovery succeeded on 8 of 11 TNF-α antibodies under similar conditions. TNF-α is the inflammatory target behind Humira and other antibody drugs, which makes the gap especially notable. The 0-for-54 result came from pre-Chai-2 methods, and later work reported at least one nanomolar TNF-α binder from Chai-2 after the review cutoff.

Flick raised a $6 million seed round and debuted a residency film series produced entirely on its platform. Fourteen filmmakers created 13 films using its AI-native toolkit, which focuses on nonlinear workflows and iterative creative control. The launch ties funding to a concrete output benchmark as the company positions itself as a full filmmaking system.

xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin is in talks to raise up to $1 billion for a new AI startup outside his current lab. The round is being discussed at up to a $5 billion valuation, with General Catalyst cited as a potential lead, underscoring continued investor appetite for top AI researchers launching new ventures.