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

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.

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.

He took over a failing Dutch tech company and turned it around. Nexperia was on the path to bankruptcy, that’s why it was on the market to be sold back in 2017. His company injected capital and made it profitable. Even last year, his parent company even announced a $200M expansion of Nexperia’s Hamburg plant, which totally goes against the narrative that they were moving production out of Europe.

The Dutch govt is trying to spin this, but they have like 5 different storylines and none of them make sense.

It’s an interesting subject. If not for Beijing’s heavy hand, could Chinese internet companies have flourished much more and become international tech giants? Maybe, but there is one obvious counterpoint: where are the European tech giants? In an open playing field, it looks like American tech giants are pretty good at buying out or simply crushing any nascent competitors. If the Chinese did not have their censorship or great firewall, maybe the situation would have been like Europe, where the government tries to impose some rules, but doesn’t really have much traction, and everyone just ends up using Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

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.