AI this week: Kimi K3 goes open, Meta cuts prices, Cloudflare sorts AI crawlers
The largest open-weights model yet, a price war from Meta, and new controls that decide which AI bots can read the web.
July 24, 2026 · By Bohol AI
Open models took a big step this week, Meta started competing on price, and the company that sits in front of about a fifth of the web changed how AI bots get in.
Kimi K3: the biggest open model so far
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that reads text, images and video and can work with up to a million tokens at once. It was available through an API immediately, and Moonshot promised to publish the weights by July 27, which would make it the largest open-weights model released to date. On many benchmarks it landed just behind the top closed models, GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5.
Why it matters: when a model this capable is free to download, anyone with the hardware can run it privately, fine-tune it, or build on it without paying per message.
Meta switches from open to cheap
Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1, a model trained for agentic tasks, and opened the Meta Model API, its first paid way to use its models. It topped two tool-use leaderboards, Scale AI’s MCP Atlas and JobBench, and Meta is pitching it on value rather than openness.
Why it matters: more competition on price usually means cheaper tools for small teams a few months later.
Cloudflare lets sites choose which AI bots to allow
Cloudflare introduced controls that treat AI bots differently depending on what they do. By default, bots that collect training data or act as agents are blocked, while search-indexing crawlers are still allowed. It also announced a tool that lets sites charge people or bots for access to pages, datasets or APIs.
Why it matters: whether your website shows up in AI answers now depends partly on your hosting settings, not only on your content.
Research: AI news answers fail at the search step
Researchers at Stanford and Together AI tested six popular models with web search on questions about the day’s news. The models were mostly accurate, especially when questions were in English. When they got things wrong, it was usually because they pulled up unhelpful articles, not because they reasoned badly.
What it means for Bohol
- If you run a website for a resort, shop or school, check whether your host blocks AI crawlers. Allowing search crawlers helps people find you through AI answers.
- AI tools answer best when good sources exist in the language of the question. Local news and guides written in Bisaya are still rare, which is a gap Bohol writers can fill.
- Open models like Kimi K3 are too large for a laptop, but smaller open models keep improving and can run privately on your own machine.
Sources
- Moonshot AI: Kimi K3
- Meta: Muse Spark and Meta Model API
- Cloudflare: new AI traffic controls
- Cloudflare: monetization gateway
- Suzgun et al., LLMs answering daily-news questions (arXiv)
- The Batch, issue 363 (DeepLearning.AI)