Interconnects

6 months to live for open models Staring down the barrel of policy action that could make open models a permanent second class citizen. interconnects.ai/p/6-months-to-…

When we were in China, @xeophon and I made a quick detour to visit Meituan. They continue to be one of our favorite open model builders, as they're showing how a variety of companies can succeed here and baffle a lot of people as to why they're making models. Meituan is one of the larger tech companies in China. They're building LLMs to add services to their own products. In China the notion of the "super app" is very popular, so this dream of more services for users with AI is very natural there. With this, Meituan wants to own the full stack of how they deliver value to their users. When we visited, they were very unassuming about everything. We just met a few people from the LLM team, a quick meeting about building models. They build general foundational reasoning models, and then fine-tune it further for their products. They can release the general model to support the ecosystem and learn how it can be used. Their focus was very clearly on ownership, and a hint of cost-saving, so the recent news of v2 being trained on asics fits with that mentality. They want to deliver real products to users with low cost. Companies like this will keep building models in China. It's a small micro study of how different the players in the AI ecosystem are. Kimi, Z ai, etc are all much flashier offices, come across as the "hot new thing" but Meituan has the talent and resources to build models as well. Congrats to the Meituan team & thx for having us!

@NVIDIAAI @Cohere_Labs @Zai_org @ZyphraAI interconnects.ai/p/artifacts-22…

Artifacts 22: Zyphra, Cohere, Poolside, and others are expanding the breadth and diversity of the ecosystem. In this issue, a total of 30 models from may/june you should be aware of, from: NVIDIA @NVIDIAAI (3) Cohere @Cohere_Labs (2) Zhipu @Zai_org Zyphra @ZyphraAI (3) Poolside @poolsideai Moonshot AI @Kimi_Moonshot StepFun @StepFun_ai Dolphin @dphnAI Google @GoogleAI (3) Nex AGI @NexEcosystem Liquid AI @liquidai MiniMax @MiniMax_AI Swiss AI Initiative @apertusllm JetBrains @jetbrains Microsoft @Microsoft H Company @hcompany_ai Datalab @datalabto (2) Baidu @Baidu_Inc PaddlePaddle @PaddlePaddle Ideogram @ideogram_ai KREA @krea_ai Photoroom @photoroom_ML Read the issue below.

GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents A capability threshold I've been carefully monitoring. interconnects.ai/p/glm-52-is-th…

Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake A general audience PSA with Kevin Xu of Interconnected interconnects.ai/p/banning-open…

State of the blog, mid-2026 About 3 years since I started writing weekly. interconnects.ai/p/state-of-the…

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Frontier post-training recipe review with Finbarr Timbers "Interview" #18 YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=sbXEPx… Interconnects: interconnects.ai/p/frontier-pos…

Welcome to the AGI era of AI governance It's a one-way door and we weren't ready for it. interconnects.ai/p/welcome-to-t…

Claude Fable 5 and new AI safety fables One step further into the power politics of frontier AI systems. interconnects.ai/p/claude-fable…

Farewell Ai2 Reflections from a wonderful stage of my career & hints for what comes next. interconnects.ai/p/farewell-ai2

Open and closed models are on different exponentials Where marginally higher intelligence drives value, and where it doesn't. interconnects.ai/p/open-and-clo…

Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026 Gemini Flash 3.5, Mythos, open-closed balance, America's open-source surge, emerging power struggles and more. interconnects.ai/p/some-ideas-f…

Latest open artifacts (#21): Open model bonanza! Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, MiMo 2.5, GLM-5.1 & others. On CAISI's V4 assessment. An eventful month with one flagship release after another interconnects.ai/p/latest-open-…

How open model ecosystems compound Further reflections on China's high-participation, open-first AI ecosystem. interconnects.ai/p/how-open-mod…

Notes from inside China's AI labs Lessons from my trip to talk to most of the leading AI labs in China. interconnects.ai/p/notes-from-i…

The distillation panic ‘Distillation attacks’ is a horrible term for what is happening right now. interconnects.ai/p/the-distilla…

Reading today's open-closed performance gap The complex factors that determine the single evaluation number so many focus on. Plus, how this changes in the future. interconnects.ai/p/reading-toda…

New video! Talking through my 10+ open model pieces from early 2026 and how they fit together. They're all trying to figure out where open models go next. youtube.com/watch?v=hKIXEg…