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News Items is the first thing I read every morning. — Katie Couric.
1. The Economist:
America’s lead over China in artificial intelligence may be at its smallest in over a year. When China disrupted the AI race in January 2025 with the release of DeepSeek r1, it erased $1 trillion from America’s capital markets. Nvidia, a chip firm, briefly shed 17% of its value; the Nasdaq sank by 3.1% in a day. American investors were troubled not only because Chinese AI was good, but because it was being given away for free. The uproar soon faded. Since then market valuations around the world have hinged ever more on the promise that AI will be both revolutionary and profitable.
Now Chinese labs are unsettling their American rivals anew in the race to monopolize the market for models. On June 13th a Beijing-based lab called Zhipu, or Z.ai, announced its latest system, GLM 5.2, promising “a step closer to frontier intelligence for everyone”. It is the most capable Chinese-trained model to date and runs at less than a tenth of the price of Anthropic’s latest release, Fable 5. And as with other Chinese models the weights, or parameters, that enable GLM 5.2 to function have been publicly released. (Sources: economist.com, chat.z.ai)
2. The Wall Street Journal:
In a matter of weeks, Microsoft has rolled out a suite of low-cost models meant to drive prices down for customers bracing from the sticker shock of skyrocketing AI bills. The company released Copilot Cowork, an autonomous AI “agent” allowing users to choose various AI models, including cheaper ones, as they complete long-running tasks.
Microsoft is weighing whether to host a version of DeepSeek, an ultralow-cost AI provider based in China that OpenAI and Anthropic have called out for distilling, or copying, their top models. Such a step would likely lead to a dramatic rise in use for the Chinese model-maker, one that could come at the expense of OpenAI and Anthropic, which are facing the prospect of a prolonged price war.
It is a striking step for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who has long played the part of elder statesman in the trillion-dollar AI race, to join a growing effort to shift the race away from the development of top models with ever-expanding capabilities. (Source: wsj.com)
3. MIT Technology Review:
Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade.
The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing the results of an independent evaluation of its new tech. The results suggest that the company’s claims might be worth paying attention to.
