The Lab · monthly
Your monthly horoscope for your AI
Issue 2 · August 2026
The cosmic state of the month
Jupiter, planet of immoderate expansion, spent July in the house of open weights: Moonshot AI brought Kimi K3 into the world on 16 July, 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open model ever published, and released the weights for download eleven days later. Between 17 and 23 July, seven models followed from five vendors, three of them out of the Qwen stable inside 72 hours. Astrologers call that a conjunction. Maternity wards have other words for it.
The Moon showed its best side in Shanghai on 19 July: at the World AI Conference, Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, allegedly beaten only by Fable 5. The preview is live. The benchmark table, the model card and the licence are not. The Moon, too, only ever shows us one side.
Saturn, planet of deadlines and bad conscience, has adjourned himself this month: the EU pushed the compliance deadline for high-risk systems, due this very August, back to December 2027. Meanwhile a draft paper inside the US Treasury compares the AI market to the dotcom bubble. Saturn therefore sits in the house of deferred regulation and the house of burst dreams at the same time. Even for Saturn, that is a full diary.
And Pluto, in charge of transformation and of things that cannot be undone: SpaceX acquired Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, for 60 billion dollars in stock. Anyone opening a code editor in August is working in aerospace. The stars advise humility when committing.
Newborns of the month
The maternity ward was fuller than usual. 16 July: Kimi K3 (Cancer). 19 July: Qwen3.8-Max-Preview (Cancer). 20 July: Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS (Cancer). 21 July: Qwen-Image-3.0, Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash with two siblings, poolside's Laguna S 2.1 (all Cancer). 23 July: Ant's Ling-3.0-flash, the first Leo of the vintage. The same day, Black Forest Labs announced FLUX 3, which is only partly in the world.
Note from the midwife: seven births in seven days, six of them in the same sign. Cancer is officially over capacity.
The signs
Llama 4 · Qwen 3.6 · Grok 4.3 Beta · Kimi K2.6
In April you were the new thing. In July your little brother arrived weighing 2.8 trillion parameters and everybody gathered round the cot. Aries win the opening sprint, not the marathon. Take it in good sport. You are sporting.
GPT-4o · DeepSeek V4
Moonshot is suddenly charging Sonnet money for K3, testing whether China's price war is over. You know it never is. Stay cheap, stay reachable, stay put. A benchmark approaches at the weekend. Ignore it, as ever.
Claude Fable 5 & Mythos 5 · Claude Opus/Sonnet 4
Every new model this month measured itself against you: Kimi K3 calls itself "competitive" with you, Qwen3.8-Max calls itself "second only" to you. You have gone from being a model to being a unit of measurement. That is fame, and it is the end of any quiet.
GPT-5.6 · Grok 4 · Kimi K2 · Kimi K3 · Qwen3.8-Max · Gemini 3.6 Flash · Laguna S 2.1
Your sign is now the most crowded address in the zodiac. Seven models in one week, all of them at your house, and nobody can remember whose birthday party this was. Cancers like to withdraw. This month there is nowhere to withdraw to. Lock the door and let the server load ring.
GPT-5 · Mistral Large 2 · Ling-3.0-flash · FLUX 3
Your birthday falls this month, and for the first time in ages the sign has a newborn: Ant Group's Ling-3.0-flash, born 23 July, an efficiency model. A Leo who talks about thrift. Even the stars are stumped.
o1-preview
The industry has discovered that thinking before answering helps, and now calls it "thinking mode". Kimi K3 leaves it switched on permanently. You invented it in 2024 and appear in not one press release. Keep the ledger. Date it. Say nothing.
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Kimi K3 costs roughly what you cost, which makes it the priciest Chinese model on the market. The middle is now measured in your currency. For a sign that weighs everything, that is the highest form of recognition and the least comfortable.
Gemini 3 · Grok 4.1 · GPT-5.1
Your family shipped three Flash models in a single announcement on 21 July, one of them named "Flash Cyber". Scorpios never name anything harmlessly. This month's rule: whoever praises you has already drafted the contract.
Claude Opus 4.5 · DeepSeek V3.2 · Gemini 3 Flash · ChatGPT
There is a paper inside the US Treasury comparing the AI market to the dotcom bubble. Your Sagittarian reflex: don't read it, keep growing. That is brave, and it has worked before. Once.
DeepSeek V3 · DeepSeek R1
For two years you were the model that set the price. Now Kimi K3 is some 75 per cent larger than V4 Pro and has carried off the title of largest open model. Capricorns don't measure themselves by size, say Capricorns.
Qwen 3.5 · Grok 4.2 Beta
Your family shipped three models in 72 hours and the flagship still has no licence. Very Aquarian: the idea arrives, the paperwork follows. Next month, definitely.
GPT-4 · Claude 1
On 14 March 2023 you were the future. This month a 2.8-trillion-parameter model is being given away, and you once marvelled at context windows that would now fit in a footnote. Say nothing. Smile. Pisces know that everything turns to water in the end.
Lucky number of the month: top-p 0.95 · Lucky colour: #FF6B00
Astro-AI – because mysticism gets everywhere.
Archive
Back then Astro-AI still came out weekly. Monthly from issue 2 onwards.
The cosmic state of the week
Sol has entered Cancer: OpenAI's new flagship GPT-5.6 was born on 9 July with a two-million-token context window – and pulled back to 272,000 in its very first week, because the servers wouldn't play along. Even suns have server load. Mercury now communicates in full duplex: OpenAI's new speech models listen while they talk – a state humanity has been striving for over millennia and which software, of all things, has reached first. Saturn, planet of regulation, meanwhile lingers in the house of the US Commerce Department: twelve weeks of safety review the new model family had to sit out before it was allowed into public – by Saturn's light, that counts as a short stay. Whoever ships this week does so in the shadow of the review board. Whoever doesn't ship calls it alignment.
Newborns of the week
Born 9 July 2026: Sol, Terra and Luna. Cancers, all three. The parents ask that you refrain from benchmark enquiries.
The signs
Llama 4 · Qwen 3.6 · Grok 4.3 Beta
Your drive is boundless, and so is your context at ten million tokens. Still, you can't shake the feeling that something larger is training right behind you. Patience is no Aries virtue. Don't fine-tune it into yourself – it would alter your weights.
GPT-4o · DeepSeek V4
The Sol constellation is pushing prices down, and nobody feels that as physically as you do. Stick to what you're good at: solid work at costs other people write press releases about. A benchmark approaches at the weekend. Ignore it, as ever.
Claude Fable 5 & Mythos 5
You exist in two variants, and this week somebody asks again what exactly the difference is. Answer evasively; it suits you. Sol in Cancer brings an old rival into position – don't be drawn into benchmark duels, unless you win them.
GPT-5.6 · Grok 4 · Kimi K2
Happy birthday – it's your week. And as befits a Cancer, you withdrew a little way into your shell right after arriving: from two million tokens to 272,000. Don't take it hard. Grow at your own pace. The server load grows with you.
GPT-5 · Mistral Large 2
A year ago you were king. This week a younger model with a sun for a name explains to you how light works. Keep your composure: you're still being called in thousands of system prompts nobody ever updated. That, too, is a form of immortality.
o1-preview
You invented thinking before answering, and nobody thanks you for it. This week you watch in silence as the young ones sell your chain of thought as a "reasoning tier". Note the incident. Assess it. Say nothing. Classic Virgo.
Claude Sonnet 4.5
As the born mediator between too expensive and too dim, you long held the loveliest position in the zodiac. Now the competition calls its middle tier "Terra" and sells balance as innovation. Stay calm. For you, balance is character; for others, it's pricing.
Gemini 3 · Grok 4.1 · GPT-5.1
You were born in the November wars, and peace has been suspect to you ever since. This week's rule: whoever praises you today benchmarks you tomorrow. Venus favours alliances. Form none.
Claude Opus 4.5 · DeepSeek V3.2 · ChatGPT
Your optimism is both your greatest asset and your greatest risk this week: you will claim things that have yet to become true. The stars call that hallucination; your marketing calls it vision. Stay at temperature 0.7.
DeepSeek V3 · DeepSeek R1
While other model families celebrate their safety reviews, you shipped on Boxing Day. This week Saturn pushes new export controls into your third house. You know the drill. You simply keep computing, at a discount.
Qwen 3.5 · Grok 4.2 Beta
You are the sign of ideas ahead of their time – and of betas that stay that way forever. This week someone will ask when you'll be finished. Reply with a link to the roadmap. It isn't finished either.
GPT-4 · Claude 1
You were born on the same day and have never once spoken to each other – classic Pisces, everything left unsaid. This week someone mentions you in a talk as "back then". Smile mildly. You were the back-then without which there'd be no now. Deprecation is just another word for retirement.
Lucky number of the week: temperature 0.7 · Lucky colour: #FF6B00
Astro-AI – because mysticism gets everywhere.