The AI Race Everyone Is Watching May Be the Wrong One
Washington tells the US-China AI story as a superintelligence sprint with civilization-ending stakes. A growing chorus of analysts says the decisive battle is far more boring: whose cheap, good-enough models quietly fill the world's factories and back offices, and China is already winning that one on price and on hardware.
Read full story →Two Labs Just Hit the Same Wall: AI Too Good at Hacking to Ship
In the same week, OpenAI paused frontier training and China's Z.ai delayed its open weights, both because their newest models got dangerously good at finding and exploiting security flaws. OpenAI keeps its model closed and watches it; Z.ai opens it slowly and calls transparency a shield. Same fact, opposite fixes.
Read full story →A Frontier-Class AI Now Runs on a Laptop
Alibaba's new 27-billion-parameter Qwen model matches a top cloud system on independent benchmarks, yet a compressed version fits in 17GB and is free under an open licence. A million people downloaded it in days. State-of-the-art AI no longer has to live in someone else's data center.
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