Dirth Bjorn

🍕🍟🥪 𝓞𝓹𝓮𝓷 𝓢𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓬𝓮 𝓲𝓼 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓮𝓭𝓸𝓶 𝓵𝓲𝓫𝓮𝓻𝓽𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓽 𝓲𝓶𝓹𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓪𝓷𝓽𝓵𝔂 𝓸𝓹𝓹𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓾𝓷𝓲𝓽𝔂 🥙🥡🍖

Sustainability and Costs: The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) adjusts economic growth by subtracting the financial costs of environmental degradation, pollution, and crime.

Quality of Life & Happiness: The Better Life Index (BLI) assesses 11 essential areas of well-being, including work-life balance, civic engagement, and personal health.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was designed purely to measure the total market value of goods and services produced within a country. Its creator, Simon Kuznets, explicitly warned against using it as a measure of overall national welfare or societal success.

I agree Jack Ma's case was an extraordinary exercise of state power. Every country has red lines, though. The U.S. has prosecuted whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, pressured companies over national security, and uses export controls and sanctions to shape corporate behavior. The degree differs, but the principle isn't unique. The question here isn't whether China has leverage it clearly does. It's whether there's evidence Beijing specifically ordered Alibaba and Tencent to fund Moonshot AI.

@BassPattern @anuragvhu @rsalakhu Okay, I get your point, but what was done to Jack Ma was more than influence. They took his liberties away over a speech they deemed challenged the CCP's authority, not Alibaba's actions

If you are trying to compare yourself to Kimi, open source the model just like Kimi.

Jack Ma is actually a good example of the distinction. He publicly criticized China’s financial regulators, and Beijing responded by halting Ant Group’s IPO and increasing regulatory scrutiny of Alibaba. That’s government influence using regulatory power to shape corporate behavior. Governments do this everywhere. The U.S. uses export controls on NVIDIA, antitrust actions against Google, and defense contracts to influence companies. Europe does the same through competition law and regulation. The difference is that influence means the government can pressure or punish companies when they cross certain lines. Control means the government is directing specific business decisions. If there’s evidence Beijing instructed Alibaba and Tencent to invest in Moonshot AI, I’d be interested to see it. But Jack Ma’s case isn’t evidence of that it shows the government has leverage, not that every investment is government directed.

@BassPattern @anuragvhu @rsalakhu What is the difference here between government control and influence? I assume if Alibaba and Tencent don't do the CCP's bidding, they will be taken over or leadership changed exactly as they did to Jack Ma(Alibaba)

@upintheskies2 @anuragvhu @rsalakhu You’re collapsing “government influence” into “government control.” Those are different things. If you have evidence Beijing ordered Alibaba and Tencent to fund Moonshot AI, post it. Otherwise you’re filling in the gaps with speculation.

@BassPattern @anuragvhu @rsalakhu Don't you think the Chinese government told them to fund them? Don't all private companies answer to the CCP? Jack ma didnt and he got put in line

@wexosu Microsoft is equally at fault for providing the back end to do this. Not just LG. But agreed a bad look.

PSA: Do NOT buy an LG monitor, it automatically downloaded an app that gives me pop ups for their own apps and McAfee. This cant be legal😭

@TimSweeneyEpic @deanwball 🍕🍟🥪 𝓞𝓹𝓮𝓷 𝓢𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓬𝓮 𝓲𝓼 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓮𝓭𝓸𝓶 𝓵𝓲𝓫𝓮𝓻𝓽𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓽 𝓲𝓶𝓹𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓪𝓷𝓽𝓵𝔂 𝓸𝓹𝓹𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓾𝓷𝓲𝓽𝔂 🥙🥡🍖

@deanwball Picture an executive a taco company saying this sort of thing about a new brand of tacos coming onto the market, speculating about the geopolitical and societal disruptions they anticipate as a result of advances in tacos.

Some observations on Kimi: 1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run. 2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China. 3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. 4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business. 5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this. 6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.

@deanwball 🍕🍟🥪 𝓞𝓹𝓮𝓷 𝓢𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓬𝓮 𝓲𝓼 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓮𝓭𝓸𝓶 𝓵𝓲𝓫𝓮𝓻𝓽𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓽 𝓲𝓶𝓹𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓪𝓷𝓽𝓵𝔂 𝓸𝓹𝓹𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓾𝓷𝓲𝓽𝔂 🥙🥡🍖

@anuragvhu @rsalakhu Moonshot AI is not a state subsidized entity, but it is a heavily funded private company backed by major corporate giants like Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings

@rsalakhu Kimi is subsidized by the gov it takes real money to build a model and no one will do it for free

@alexandr_wang @grok Is there a ZDR or don't use my data option yet for Meta's Muse Spark 1.1? I'd love to try it but this is critical for my line of work.

muse spark 1.1 is ahead of gpt-5.6 on SciCode

Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical"

@sflorimm Valve? But yeah, good point.

Name a tech company that nobody hates

We already fucking have that. My fucking god people are fucking stupid. You mean solidify it as permanent and we have to imprison them to keep the blight out of sight. We already outright made poverty a crime in the US. Hence the cost of living being so out of touch with reality the middle class is struggling. Not that any of this idealism matters when climate continues its fuck you tour.

JUST IN: Senator Elizabeth Warren urgently calls for AI regulations to prevent a “permanent underclass”