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Devin at 89%, Opus 4.8 Price War & Illinois AI Safety Law
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Cognition raises $1B for Devin as its autonomous coding agent now writes 89% of its own codebase — a structural shift in enterprise software. Plus: Anthropic undercuts OpenAI on price, Illinois passes landmark AI safety legislation, and OpenAI's model cracks an 80-year-old math conjecture.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Cognition just raised one billion dollars for Devin, its autonomous coding agent, at a valuation of twenty-six billion dollars. Eight months ago, that valuation was ten-point-two billion.
Here's the detail that actually tells the story. In December, Devin wrote thirteen percent of Cognition's own codebase.
On the model side, Anthropic released Claude Opus four-point-eight with a fast mode that's two-and-a-half times quicker and three times cheaper than its previous version, while matching the same pricing as Claude four-point-seven. The competitive implication is direct.
At the regulatory layer, Illinois just passed a landmark AI safety law that includes whistleblower protections. The federal backdrop matters here.
OpenAI's model found the first counterexample to the Erdős planar unit distance problem, an eighty-year-old conjecture in mathematics. DeepMind has separately resolved nine Erdős problems.
Demis Hassabis framed AI this week as a species-level transition moving ten times faster than the Industrial Revolution, with a five-to-ten year window for meaningful international coordination. That framing sits alongside a one-billion-dollar coding agent raise and a state AI law passed without federal guidance.
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