# Open-source and enterprise AI sector developments > Live situation record from CLSTR: https://clstr.news/situations/open-source-and-enterprise-ai-sector-developments > Updated: 2026-09-01T20:50:00.000Z. Sources: 2. Developments: 2. The artificial intelligence sector is seeing increased activity in open-source development and enterprise-focused evaluation and training. Initial developments included Vals AI securing $40 million in Series A funding to create the Vals Index, a benchmark designed to assess large language models on real-world utility such as legal research and financial analysis. Simultaneously, the OpenWALDO project was launched to establish a shared, open-source training dataset to improve transparency and address concerns regarding the use of unconsented or copyrighted data. As competition in the open-weight model space intensified, the startup Applied Compute, founded by former OpenAI researchers, began seeking $350 million in funding to provide custom open-source models and cloud hosting for enterprise clients. In the same period, DeepSeek released ‘DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp’, an experimental multimodal model under an MIT license, which demonstrated high performance in specific image agent benchmarks. ## Timeline ### 2026-09-01: Applied Compute seeks $350M funding as open-source AI competition intensifies Former OpenAI researchers have founded Applied Compute to provide custom open-source AI for enterprises, while DeepSeek releases a new multimodal open-weight model capable of competing with Claude Opus 4.8. 2 sources. https://clstr.news/cluster/applied-compute-seeks-350m-funding-as-open-source-ai-competition-intensifies ### 2026-08-12: AI sector sees new developments in model evaluation and open-source data Vals AI raises $40M to build real-world AI performance benchmarks, while the OpenWALDO project launches to create transparent, open-source AI training datasets. 2 sources. https://clstr.news/cluster/ai-sector-sees-new-developments-in-model-evaluation-and-open-source-data --- Cite as: Open-source and enterprise AI sector developments. CLSTR, https://clstr.news/situations/open-source-and-enterprise-ai-sector-developments