A Powerful Delusion.
A look at the leaderboard.
“It’s the first thing I read every morning.“ — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, MLB.
1. For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to wring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today more capable than the computers that filled entire rooms 40 years ago. While some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending, IBM is saying not so fast. The big tech company on Thursday released details of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another 10 years. Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips, IBM said, the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail-size chip as the last technology it introduced in 2021. That will offer 50 percent greater computing performance and 70 percent better energy efficiency, the company said. Both attributes are in hot demand, particularly in the race to build data centers for artificial intelligence. (Sources: research.ibm.com, nytimes.com)
2. World Models:
Many researchers are now convinced that humanlike AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will require more than mastering language and images. It will require AIs that can reason about space, causality, and the consequences of actions—especially if they are to control humanoid robots, operate factories, and explore other planets.
Few people have argued for this need more forcefully than AI pioneer Yann LeCun. “I joke that the smartest systems we have today are not as smart as a house cat,” he says. A cat can’t code like an LLM, but it can survive by its wits. The notion that simply scaling an LLM will get to AGI is “complete nonsense,” he says. “It’s like saying you’re going to get into orbit by scaling airplanes. There’s a very powerful delusion circulating in Silicon Valley that this is the case.”
LeCun left a top job at Meta to co-found one of a growing number of labs and startups developing “world models”—systems that build representations of how the world works—and agents that operate within them to learn or plan. Ultimately, these researchers hope that more closely mimicking how the human mind learns will give AI stunning new powers. (Sources: science.org, spectrum.ieee.org, amturing.acm.org)
3. Two weeks ago, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic shut down its two most powerful A.I. systems after an unexpected demand from the U.S. government to cut access to it. Days later, a Chinese start-up, Z.ai, released an A.I. model that is nearly as powerful as Anthropic’s models, Fable and Mythos. But Z.ai’s new technology costs much less to use, and no one in the United States was putting restrictions on it. It quickly landed on a closely watched leaderboard of the world’s 10 most popular models. Z.ai is on the cutting edge of a wave of powerful but inexpensive A.I. from China that is challenging the lock that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have had on the industry. Six of the models now on the A.I. leaderboard were developed in China. Z.ai’s new model, GLM-5.2, arrived just as U.S. businesses realized that they had to find ways to cut down on how much they were spending on A.I. It also landed when executives in Silicon Valley were becoming worried that the Trump administration was leaning toward regulating the technology. “With Fable restricted, the gap between the U.S. and China is very slim,” said Rehaan Ahmad, a co-founder of the Silicon Valley start-up alphaXiv, who has been using Z.ai’s new model for more than a week. The Chinese models still face two big hurdles to widespread use in the United States: concerns about their ties to the Chinese government and complaints that Chinese companies have unfairly used American technology to build these cheaper models. But their low cost is winning converts. (Sources: nytimes.com, openrouter.ai)
4. The Trump administration has asked OpenAI to limit the release of its next model, GPT-5.6, to only a small set of government-approved partners before any wider release, citing security concerns, according to a source familiar with the matter. This marks the first time the U.S. government has preemptively asked an American AI company to restrict the launch of a model before release. The White House's Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked OpenAI to limit the rollout of GPT-5.6 as the administration builds a framework for testing and evaluating the security of new models, per the source. The source told Axios that OpenAI has been proactively working with the administration on the model release since before Anthropic revoked access to its frontier models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, over a rare Commerce Department directive. The White House has been looped in on the capabilities of OpenAI's new model and has been able to preview its abilities. (Source: axios.com)
5. AI and Public Opinion (in the U.S.):
Three-quarters of Americans think AI should be more regulated, according to YouGov, a pollster, with Republicans nearly as keen as Democrats. Almost two-thirds of Americans think the technology is advancing too quickly, versus only 2% who say “too slowly”, according to the Pew Research Centre. Policy is struggling to keep up with the pace of change.
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