This post is an adaptation of an internal wrap-up I shared at Playtomic to celebrate our AI journey in H1 2026. I've kept the public-facing industry insights and general learnings while removing internal-only details.
Happy mid-year! If you felt like AI was moving fast this half, you weren't imagining it. Frontier models got a serious upgrade, century-old math problems fell, robots ran half-marathons, data centers went underwater and into space... the world didn't slow down for a second.
Here's your skim-friendly wrap of what happened out there. 🌍
Frontier models became genuinely dangerous. The latest top-tier models can now find critical flaws in major software. Anthropic's answer was Project Glasswing: keep the raw model locked, release a guarded public version — but the UK government confirmed both approaches can be jailbroken. Mythos stays locked, the jailbreaks and open models don't. 🔐
Chinese models closed the gap — to weeks, not months. Kimi K3 is the largest open-source model ever and placed ahead of Claude Opus 4.8 on real-world coding benchmarks, following DeepSeek R2 and Qwen 3 earlier in H1. US export controls were supposed to keep China behind. They didn't — the gap went from a semester to a quarter. 🇨🇳
