Cognition's $10b Series C; Smol AI updates

**Cognition** raised **$400M** at a **$10.2B** valuation to advance AI coding agents, with **swyx** joining the company. **Vercel** launched an OSS coding platform using a tuned **GPT-5** agent loop. The **Kimi K2-0905** model achieved top coding eval scores and improved agentic capabilities with doubled context length. **Alibaba** released **Qwen3-ASR**, a multilingual transcription model with robust noise handling. **Meta** introduced Set Block Decoding for 3-5× faster decoding without architectural changes. Innovations in KV cache compression and quantization were highlighted, including **AutoRound** in SGLang and **QuTLASS v0.1.0** for Blackwell GPUs. Algorithmic benchmarking tools like **AlgoPerf v0.6** were updated for efficiency.