OpenAI Blog
OpenAI completed its inaugural Scholars program with the first cohort of participants finishing their projects. The program provided stipends and mentorship to selected individuals to work on AI research over a defined period. Graduates are now positioned to contribute to the broader AI research community through their completed work.
Our first cohort of OpenAI Scholars has now completed the program.
The daily briefing
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TLDRocket
21 July 2026
The open-weight AI model market hit an inflection point today as Alibaba and Kimi released trillion-parameter competitors that challenge the closed-model orthodoxy—just as Washington moved to restrict them. Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max (2.4 trillion parameters) and Kimi K3 (2.8T) are going open-weight, with K3 ranking first on Frontend Web App Arena and fourth on agentic benchmarks, signaling that scale and transparency can coexist. The timing matters: while U.S. policymakers weigh layered restrictions on Chinese open models, technical experts are pushing back hard, arguing that closed gardens actually hurt security and competition more than they help. The real fragmentation risk isn't technical—it's regulatory.
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