Mortgage rates hit 6.55%, highest in nearly a year on oil surge

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[1] Mortgage rates jump to highest level in almost a year (https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/mortgage- ...)[2] Today’s Mortgage Refinance Rates: July 13, 2026 – No Movement On Rates - Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/refi ...)[3] Mortgage rates rise to highest level in nearly a year, causing homebuyers to pause - CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/15/mortgage-rate ...)[4] Mortgage rates rose again amid renewed tensions with Iran (https://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/article ...)[5] Average 30-year US mortgage rate climbs to 6.55%, highest level in nearly a year (https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/07/16/mortg ...)

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Jul 16 2026, 18:38

Google Gemini 3.5 Pro delayed 3 months as coding performance trails rivals

Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro has missed three consecutive launch deadlines after the company scrapped its original base model and restarted pretraining, leaving the search giant without a competitive flagship as rivals ship production-ready alternatives. "The delay is about agent work, not chatbot polish," Dave Barr, a technology analyst at Startup Fortune, said. "Enterprise buyers now test models on coding, tool use, and long-horizon tasks — and Google's internal evaluation found the original model couldn't clear those bars." The rebuilt model targets a 2 million token context window — double Gemini 2.5 Pro's 1 million cap — and a new Deep Think reasoning mode for multi-step logic, according to leaked specifications reported by multiple outlets. But the original version showed structural failures in recursive tool-calling and complex SVG generation, according to HackerNoon, citing unnamed internal sources. Gemini 3.5 Flash, which launched May 19, already outperforms Gemini 3.1 Pro on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (76.2% vs. 70.3%) and MCP Atlas (83.6% vs. 78.2%), per Google's official launch post — making the Pro model's regression on those same tasks a fundamental capability gap rather than a finishing problem. Alphabet shares slipped as much as 3.2% on the initial delay report, and the stock fell roughly 5% to 7% in late June after key researchers — including Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer and Nobel laureate John Jumper — departed for OpenAI and Anthropic, wiping an estimated $225 billion in market capitalization. Google trades at roughly 22 times forward earnings, a discount to Microsoft's 30 times, reflecting the market's growing skepticism about its AI monetization timeline. ## The Rebuild Decision Signals a Structural Problem Pre-training is the most expensive phase of building a frontier AI model — a months-long run on vast datasets that establishes the model's fundamental capability ceiling. Fine-tuning and reinforcement learning can refine within those bounds but cannot raise them. When Google chose to restart pre-training rather than continue refining, it was conceding that the original model's ceiling was in the wrong place. According to reporting from Geeky Gadgets, citing World of AI, the rebuilt model has now encountered a third delay due to frequent hallucinations and inconsistent outputs in real-world workflows — distinct failure modes from the recursive tool-calling problems that drove the first rebuild. Google DeepMind has registered model names including Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash Light, suggesting the company is preparing stopgap releases while Pro development continues. The talent exodus compounds the technical challenges. Shazeer — whom Google spent a reported $2.7 billion to bring back from Character.AI in 2024 — left for OpenAI in June. Jumper joined Anthropic the same week, along with Google researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Cannes that Google has "by far the biggest and broadest research bench of any of the labs out there," but headcount alone does not determine who ships first. ## Rivals Already in Production With Competitive Pricing The competitive landscape has hardened considerably since Google I/O in May. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 reached general availability July 9 across three tiers — Sol at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, Terra at $2.50 and $15, and Luna at $1 and $6 — all sharing a 1.05 million token context window. OpenAI confirmed Sol sets a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1, per its July 9 launch announcement. Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 launched July 1 after a brief export-control review, with usage-based fees attached to its most capable model. Grok 4.5 from SpaceXAI launched July 8 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, co-trained with developer session data from Cursor, the coding editor SpaceX agreed to acquire in June. Independent benchmarking organization Artificial Analysis placed Grok 4.5 fourth on its Intelligence Index at launch. That leaves Google as the only major frontier lab without a 2026 flagship in general production on the date its own CEO promised delivery. Prediction markets on Polymarket now show 81% probability of a July 31 delivery as the leading outcome, with a separate market showing "August 7" at 73% — reflecting traders' growing confidence that neither July 17 nor July 24 will produce a launch. ## What Developers Should Watch Next For teams that built plans around a July 17 Gemini 3.5 Pro launch, the watch signal remains the official one: gemini-3.5-pro appearing as a generally available model in the public Gemini API documentation. Model name registrations, leaks, and unnamed internal sources do not constitute a launch. One deadline developers cannot ignore is July 24, when DeepSeek's legacy API aliases — deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner — stop responding, with no announced extension. Teams calling either alias need to migrate to deepseek-v4-pro or deepseek-v4-flash before that date. DeepSeek V4 offers a 1 million token context window and competitive pricing, but teams should note that DeepSeek is headquartered in China and subject to the country's National Intelligence Law, which requires all organizations to cooperate with national intelligence work on demand. For workloads that fit within a 1 million token context window, Gemini 3.5 Flash, GPT-5.6 Terra, or Claude Fable 5 represent production options available today. Google can still make this quarter work if the rebuilt Pro model ships with verified benchmark improvements and competitive pricing. But the reported $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens — if accurate — would price Gemini 3.5 Pro above all current production competitors, requiring strong benchmark differentiation to justify. The rebuild decision tells developers that Google's internal evaluation concluded the competitive gap was real enough to justify a costly intervention. Whether that intervention produced a model that closes the gap against GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 is a question only the official model card and independent benchmarking can answer. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Jul 16 2026, 18:33

IREN plunges 41% in a month as AI-infrastructure stocks face repricing

**IREN shares have lost 41% of their value in a month, but the selloff is hitting every miner-turned-AI-infrastructure name, not just one company.** IREN shares fell 9% to $34.67 on Thursday, capping a 41.3% monthly decline that erased the June rally above $60. The stock remains up 101% over the past year but is down 8% year to date. "There are no idle GPUs," Daniel Roberts, co-chief executive officer at IREN, said on the company's last earnings call, declaring all operational capacity fully contracted. The selloff is sector-wide. Core Scientific shares dropped 26% over the past month, TeraWulf fell 36%, and Applied Digital lost 43% — all part of a broader AI-infrastructure de-rating that has hit chips, servers, and cloud names. IREN posted a Q3 FY2026 net loss of $247.8 million on revenue that missed consensus by 34%. The question for investors is whether IREN's $3.4 billion NVIDIA contract, $2.6 billion cash position, and 5 gigawatts of secured power make it an abandoned gem — or whether the 4.3 beta and unprofitable profile mean more downside ahead as the AI-capex cycle reprices. **What IREN Actually Owns** IREN is pivoting from Bitcoin mining to large-scale AI cloud infrastructure. The company signed a five-year, $3.4 billion AI Cloud contract with NVIDIA alongside an investment commitment of up to $2.1 billion. It also holds a multi-year AI Cloud contract with Microsoft, is deploying NVIDIA Blackwell chips, and plans to add the upcoming Vera Rubin architecture. IREN recently acquired Mirantis for managed cloud services. The company targets $3.7 billion in annualized recurring revenue and 150,000 deployed GPUs by the end of calendar 2026. Of that, $3.1 billion is under contract, leaving about $1.3 billion — or 30% of the target — outside the contracted figure. IREN reported $3.69 billion of convertible notes at March 31 and 357.4 million shares outstanding, up 38.5% from a year earlier. IREN has reduced some funding risk. It closed a $3.65 billion GPU facility for the Microsoft contract on June 1 and, with a $1.94 billion customer prepayment, said 96% of $5.81 billion in GPU spending was funded at an average financing cost of 3.31%. A separate $1.6 billion purchase from Dell for Blackwell systems was still being financed when IREN last detailed it. **A Lower-Volatility Alternative** Investors who want data-center exposure without single-stock miner risk can look at the Global X Data Center and Digital Infrastructure ETF. The fund holds Applied Digital at 3.2% of net assets and does not carry IREN, Core Scientific, or TeraWulf. It skews toward established data-center REITs including Equinix, Digital Realty, and American Tower, plus chipmakers such as NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Marvell Technology. Near-term catalysts for IREN include the Microsoft revenue ramp expected in Q3 FY2026, the Sweetwater 1 substation energization, and additional 50,000 GPU deployments. Whether IREN can convert $3.1 billion in contracted ARR into reported revenue over the next few quarters is the swing factor for the thesis. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Jul 16 2026, 18:32

Silence Therapeutics surges 107% as divesiran data looms in 2026

**Silence Therapeutics PLC shares surged 107% in six months as investors focused on key divesiran data expected in 2026 and progress across the company's RNAi pipeline.** Silence Therapeutics PLC shares more than doubled in the past six months, surging 107%, as investors focused on a pivotal data readout for lead candidate divesiran and advancing RNAi pipeline programs. "Silence Therapeutics is advancing multiple siRNA programs targeting indications with high unmet need," the company said in its most recent pipeline update. The London-based biotech has positioned divesiran, an siRNA therapeutic targeting the complement pathway, as its most advanced wholly owned candidate. The 107% surge through July 16 outpaced the broader biotech sector by a wide margin. Silence Therapeutics' rally reflects investor conviction in its mRNAi GOLD platform, which aims to improve siRNA stability and delivery — two challenges that have historically limited the field. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., the RNAi pioneer with three approved drugs and a market capitalization above $30 billion, demonstrated the commercial viability of the modality. For Silence Therapeutics, the divesiran readout represents a binary catalyst that will determine whether the company can compete with better-capitalized rivals including Alnylam and Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals Inc. A positive result could open a path to regulatory filing and partnership interest from larger pharmaceutical companies. A negative outcome risks reversing the gains accumulated over the past six months. The company's pipeline includes additional siRNA programs in preclinical and early clinical development, though divesiran remains the primary value driver. Silence Therapeutics is developing the drug for complement-mediated diseases, an area where Alnylam's cemdisiran has also shown activity. The competitive landscape in RNAi therapeutics has intensified since Novo Nordisk A/S acquired Dicerna Pharmaceuticals for $3.3 billion in 2021, validating the platform approach and setting a valuation benchmark for RNAi-focused companies. ## The RNAi Competitive Landscape Silence Therapeutics' mRNAi GOLD platform is designed to produce siRNAs with enhanced stability and targeted delivery, aiming to overcome two of the field's historical challenges: efficient delivery to extrahepatic tissues and durable target silencing. Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc. are also advancing RNA-targeted programs, creating a competitive field of roughly a dozen publicly traded companies in the space. Silence Therapeutics shares, which have more than doubled this year, now trade at a valuation that reflects expectations of a positive divesiran outcome. The binary nature of the setup means continued upside if data meet or exceed expectations, or a sharp correction if results disappoint. The company's cash runway and potential partnership interest from larger pharmaceutical companies seeking RNAi assets provide some downside protection. Alnylam's market cap and Novo Nordisk's $3.3 billion Dicerna acquisition offer reference points for what a validated RNAi platform could be worth. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.