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Some Monday morning what-ifs for your consideration. From a New York Times op-ed by Jen Harris, what if the deflation of an AI bubble prompts the U.S. government to take over frontier labs like it’s taken over “America’s other big-ticket national security expenses, such as aircraft carriers and warheads”? From the Economist, what if it turned out Chinese firms were better off making their own AI models from scratch, rather than distilling ones from U.S. frontier labs? From Convovo, what if you force your favorite AI chatbot to tell you how to vote in the midterms? 

And what if we stop dealing in hypotheticals and look at the news? Wonder no more, because that one’s about to happen.

→ Kimi K3.1 Pro attracts hype, suspicion
→ Reddit’s open source community bans AI
→ You must listen to Block’s Dessa voice model demo

... and all the other AI news we couldn’t fit here.

The news: The most consequential development in AI over the weekend turned out to be the response to the Friday release of Moonshot AI’s 3 trillion parameter Kimi K3.1 Pro model. It immediately earned some bragging rights when Artificial Analysis ranked it higher than any model from OpenAI or Google on its Intelligence Index, and it topped the rankings—beating even Anthropic—on the more real-world-task-centric Terminal Bench 4.0. But the positive vibes never really materialized as AI social media was soon awash with screenshots appearing to show that Moonshot was pushing influencers to hype the model in highly specific ways without disclosing that they were being paid to do so.

The takeaway: Zichen Wang of the Center for China and Globalization wrote that the one-two punch of strict control over speech and nondisclosure of sponsorship “looks strikingly familiar in China’s fragmented media and social media landscape,” where influencers “regularly publish content about companies and products in exchange for payment.”

The news: A post on Reddit’s r/opensource has laid down the law: there will be no more posts advertising open source projects that are heavily reliant on AI (though there’s considerable controversy about how this standard can be enforced), and no projects intended for AI. “Tokens are cheap, and we don’t care how many you spent to make your amazing project,” wrote r/opensource mod Wolvereness.

The takeaway: It’s a weird time for the open source movement. AI is enabling purportedly “open source” projects that crack open the published code on major applications like Adobe Creative Suite (not to mention games) and make them editable by anyone—as well as free for anyone to use. But clearly not everyone in the community is enthusiastic about the methods involved.

The news: It gives me no pleasure to report that you need to drop everything and listen to the promotional samples Jack Dorsey’s company Block released Friday for its conversational voice model called “Dessa.” Dessa was supposedly trained—using exactly one (1) NVIDIA GB200 NVL72—exclusively on spoken conversations, can talk and listen at the same time, and, well, sounds like an utterly convincing human conversation partner. It has everything you expect from a phone call with a friend, even a friend who is tired and can’t even. You get pauses, “like”s, vocal fry, and liberal use of “or whatever” or whatever. It’s so horrifyingly convincing that after hearing this cursed audio, you’ll want to float away to a less scary world where robots still can’t do this.

The takeaway: These are just demos, and it’s not at all clear whether this model will be publicly available or commercialized, whether its functions are limited to smalltalk, and whether it’s even stable when we’re not listening to a polished sample. In fact, it’s not abundantly clear that Block plans to do anything at all with this technology. According to Block, the three reasons Dessa was made are “curiosity (aka fun), better understanding between humans and AI, and safety.”

Yeah but I still have questions, or whatever…

In a New York Times op-ed, Harris compares and contrasts the economies of 2008 and today.
Read more →

Shortly after release, Moonshot AI nerfed the cyber capabilities of the aforementioned Kimi K3.1 Pro 

OpenAI’s apparent plan to undercut Anthropic and swipe its customers appears to be working

Congress and the White House want AI founders to stop talking about things like existential risk and sentience.

As neocloud companies face market headwinds, Nvidia, sometimes known as the “bank of AI” faces a financial stress test

The U.K. government forms the AI Biosecurity Lab with U.K. taxpayer money, and some help from OpenAI and Anthropic

The ominous story of how AI chips turned into debt

As Brazil prepared to vote, the campaign of President Lula da Silva said Meta’s AI was biased against him

The producers of Blue Planet III, an underwater nature documentary narrated by a 100-year-old, will reportedly leave flawed shots unaltered to prove that AI wasn’t used

Lord have mercy: the Elvis Presley estate has filed suit, alleging that Anthropic infringed on its copyrights

Most countries have picked sides between the US-affiliated Pax Silica AI bloc, and the China-affiliated WAICO AI bloc, but Kazakhstan asks why not both?