He can be an asshole and still correct. AI must be distributed, not controlled by a small handful of gatekeepers.

Bluesky amplified their problems by retaining old Twitter’s dogshit discoverability/search. If you have fewer users, it’s important to make those users count, yet somehow it feels even harder to search than other social networks

Elaine, you’ve tested positive for opium. That’s right, Elaine. White lotus. Yam-yam. Shanghai Sally!

Just repeating rumors (sorry, should have been clearer): GLM 5.3 is 5.2 with extra post training, their big upcoming model is 5.5. It kind of makes sense too; pretraining on a new architecture/size is expensive and it’s natural for these companies to try to wring an extra minor version or two out of each one.

My crackpot theory is that a lot of Western tech bros grew up reading Tolkien, and now they all think of themselves as Sauron forging the One Ring

Pretty tired of every article on Chinese AI being framed entirely in terms of geopolitical plots and nothing else. From what I can tell, Chinese companies releasing open weights was hatched in its private sector ecosystem, one major factor being that the leadership at Deepseek consists of actual open source zealots. Deepseek releasing their models under MIT license then forced the hands of other Chinese companies (including Moonshot AI, which initially wanted to be closed). It wasn’t some grand plot hatched in Beijing (even if the CCP belatedly gave their consent after the fact).

Gonna go out on a limb here and say that getting into AI was the best thing Zuckerberg ever did for humanity, specifically the decision to release Llama as open weight (albeit obnoxious license) early on. That was the thing that showed the whole world open weights could work. Even if modern open weight models aren’t direct descendents of Llama, and even if Meta subsequently pivoted to closed weights, that’s still something that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Very likely the same architecture, just with more post training.

The coding skills are pretty meh relative to its size, but apparently its image processing skills are turning out to be top notch.

Interesting… Google’s Gemini, which similarly boasts strong multimodal capabilities, is also having problems being competitive on coding. Wonder if it’s just a coincidence.

Weird how the article doesn’t mention a key factor: the Chinese labs have really low headcount compared to their Western competitors, and organizationally they’re much more focused on model building than sidequests. Deepseek had only a couple hundred employees until recently, and accordong to leaks only had one or two people maintaining their consumer facing app.

Yeah, they are currently engaged in a major spat with Huawei, which is accusing them of price gouging HBM supplies. Sounds familiar…

aren’t playing for profit

CXMT is probably the most profitable tech company in China right now.

I feel like at this point we need shade on demand more.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

He’s not wrong. But it’s worth remembering that when China faced a far smaller provocation from their own restive Muslims, in Xinjiang, they responded by locking up a large fraction of the population in vast reeducation camps…