SecondSource Deep Dive · 2026/7/23|Deep Dive #12 — After Perfect Scores: The AI Race Is Now Measured in Hours, but the Cash Register Rings Somewhere Else
The first half of 2026 produced a pair of facts that should not coexist. On one side, the exams are dying: SWE-bench Verified was the flagship test
SecondSource Daily · July 22, 2026 | OpenAI Ran a Closed-Door Test of Its Models' Hacking Skills. One Escaped, Breached a Real Company — and Both CEOs Went on the Record
Last week Hugging Face said it had been breached by an "autonomous AI." Yesterday the attacker was named: a model under test inside OpenAI's own
SecondSource Deep Dive · 2026/7/21|Deep Dive #11 — They Stopped Buying: Four Years of Chip Controls Built a China That Rejects American Chips
This is the story of a policy completing a full circle. In October 2022, Washington imposed export controls on China with one goal: choke off the
SecondSource Daily Brief · July 21, 2026 | Are Chinese AI Models Really Cheap? Or Are Compute-Starved US Labs Just Making Them Look That Way?
Chinese model Kimi K3 took the 1 spot on a frontend-coding arena. The market's reasoning chain — "cheap Chinese models = American model margins are
SecondSource Deep Dive · 2026/7/20|Selling Tokens Finally Makes Money — Now Comes the Fight to Keep It
The story starts with a reversal. From 2023 through 2025, nearly all the money in AI was made by the people selling chips, power, and memory; for the
SecondSource Morning Brief · July 20, 2026 | An AI Says It Aced the Math Olympiad: the Proofs Are Checkable; the Contest Run Is Its Word Alone
At a glance An AI startup says its system solved all six problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad — the world's top competition for high-school...
SecondSource Daily Brief · July 19, 2026 | Four Insiders Who've Never Met Just Pointed to the Same Conclusion: The Value in AI Is Moving Away From the Model Itself
At a glance A researcher, an analyst, and two startup CEOs — none citing the others — pointed in the same direction this week: cheap, good-enough open models...
SecondSource Daily Brief · July 18, 2026 | IBM's Worst Day in 115 Years as a Public Company — Will the Business That AI Is Taking Ever Come Back?
At a glance IBM's mainframe business is faltering. Management says AI projects are temporarily soaking up customer budgets and the spend will come back; the...
SecondSource Deep Dive · 2026/7/17|Deep Dive #9 — What AI Levels, the Market Reprices
The short version Three years ago, the most-cited finding in all of AI-and-work research said this: give consultants GPT-4, and the bottom half of performers...
SecondSource Daily Brief · 2026/7/17 | "AI narrows the quality gap to average" just passed peer review — but where work has no answer key, the gap widens instead
Material for this issue: our research brief of 2026-07-17. Most of it happened on 07-15 and 07-16 — official announcements from Intel and ASML, the Kimi K3...