Schneider Electric Buys Industrial AI Startup Cognite for $3.1B

French startup Kog challenges the assumption that GPUs are poorly suited for agentic AI workflows. The company is developing deeper optimization techniques to extract more inference performance from GPU hardware. This work suggests that current GPU utilization for agent-based AI tasks may be suboptimal rather than fundamentally limited by hardware design.

DeepSeek launched DeepSeek-V4-Pro, an updated flagship model for agentic workloads, alongside DeepSeek Harness v0.1, an open-source agent framework available under MIT license. The releases position DeepSeek as a competitor to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex by offering developers an alternative agent infrastructure layer. Simultaneously, DeepSeek is shifting from flat API pricing to peak and off-peak rates starting August 16, with substantially higher prices across the board.

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13, 2026, positioning it as an improved workhorse model for coding and agent-based tasks. The model arrives three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash and delivers measurable gains in software engineering, web development, and knowledge-intensive workflows at half the per-token cost of its predecessor. The release reflects developer feedback and algorithmic improvements aimed at production-ready code generation and complex document processing.

AI training companies like Mercor are actively acquiring internal communications and code from startups, offering payments up to $300,000 for Slack threads, GitHub records, and meeting transcripts. Warmly's CEO received four such acquisition offers within days of the company's HubSpot acquisition announcement. The practice highlights how internal startup data has become a commodity for AI model training, even as acquirers may not want the same datasets.