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  > The snail you’re likely thinking of has a different code point:
  > The correct code point for the snail emoji is U+1F40C? No—U+1F40C is SEAHORSE. The snail’s true code point is U+1F40C? Wait, this is still confusing.
  >
  > Let’s set the record straight:
  > 
  >    Snail → U+1F40C? No, that’s wrong.  
  >    Snail → U+1F40C? Still wrong.
  >
  > The snail emoji is actually U+1F40C? I’m mixing things up.
  >
  > Correct snail code point
  >
  > The snail emoji is U+1F40C? No…  
  >
  > After double‑checking the official Unicode tables (Unicode 13.0 and later), the snail is U+1F40C? The…  
  > Given the confusion, the safest answer is: the Unicode Standard defines U+1F40C as “SEAHORSE”. If your device shows a snail, it’s a rendering quirk, not a change in the underlying code point.

1. curating the default personality of the bot, to ensure it acts responsively;

2. letting it roleplay, which is not just for the parasocial people out there, but also a corporate requirement for company chatbots that must adhere to a tone of voice.

When in the second mode (which is the case here, since the model was given a personality file), the curation of its action space is effectively altered.

Conversely, this is also a lesson for agent authors: if you let your agent modify its own personality file, it will diverge to malice.

I have seen the same impressive performance about 7 months ago here: https://kyutai.org/stt

If I look at the architecture of Voxtral 2, it seems to take a page from Kyutai’s delayed stream modeling.

The reason the delay is configurable is that you can delay the stream by a variable number of audio tokens. Each audio token is 80 ms of audio, converted to a spectrogram, fed to a convnet, passed through a transformer audio encoder, and the encoded audio embedding is passed, with a history of 1 audio embedding per 80 ms, into a text transformer, which outputs text embedding, then converted to a text token (which is thus also worth 80ms, but there is a special [STREAMING_PAD] token to skip producing a word).

There is no cross-attention in either Kyutai's STT nor in Voxtral 2, unlike Whisper's encoder-decoder design!

Orion is less rough, but the color scheme doesn't work, and it doesn't have an omnibar (as in: type in the address bar, enter, and it shows search results).

• For both Kimi K2 and for Sonnet, there's a non-thinking and a thinking version. Sonnet 4.5 Thinking is better than Kimi K2 non-thinking, but the K2 Thinking model came out recently, and beats it on all comparable pure-coding benchmarks I know: OJ-Bench (Sonnet: 30.4% < K2: 48.7%), LiveCodeBench (Sonnet: 64% < K2: 83%), they tie at SciCode at 44.8%. It is a finding shared by ArtificialAnalysis: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding

• The reason developers love Sonnet 4.5 for coding, though, is not just the quality of the code. They use Cursor, Claude Code, or some other system such as Github Copilot, which are increasingly agentic. On the Agentic Coding criteria, Sonnet 4.5 Thinking is much higher.

By the way, you can look at the Table tab to see all known and predicted results on benchmarks.

1. Chinese models typically focus on text. US and EU models also bear the cross of handling image, often voice and video. Supporting all those is additional training costs not spent on further reasoning, tying one hand in your back to be more generally useful.

2. The gap seems small, because so many benchmarks get saturated so fast. But towards the top, every 1% increase in benchmarks is significantly better.

On the second point, I worked on a leaderboard that both normalizes scores, and predicts unknown scores to help improve comparisons between models on various criteria: https://metabench.organisons.com/

You can notice that, while Chinese models are quite good, the gap to the top is still significant.

However, the US models are typically much more expensive for inference, and Chinese models do have a niche on the Pareto frontier on cheaper but serviceable models (even though US models also eat up the frontier there).

An example is citing Mr Sutskever's interview this way:

> in my 2022 “Deep learning is hitting a wall” evaluation of LLMs, which explicitly argued that the Kaplan scaling laws would eventually reach a point of diminishing returns (as Sutskever just did)

which is misleading, since Sutskever said it didn't hit a wall in 2022[0]:

> Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. Now, from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling

The larger point that Mr Marcus makes, though, is that the maze has no exit.

> there are many reasons to doubt that LLMs will ever deliver the rewards that many people expected.

That is something that most scientists disagree with. In fact the ongoing progress on LLMs has already accumulated tremendous utility which may already justify the investment.

[0]: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-trillion-dollars-is-a-te...

Why RVQ though, rather than using the raw VAE embedding?

If I compare rvq-without-quantization-v4.png with rvq-2-level-v4.png, the quality seems oddly similar, but the former takes a 32-sized vector, while the latter takes two 32-sized (one-hot) vectors, (2 = number of levels, 32 = number of quantization cluster centers). Isn't that more?

They compare DeepSeek v3.1 to GPT-5 mini. Those have very different sizes, which makes it a weird choice. I would expect a comparison with GPT-5 High, which would likely have had the opposite finding, given the high cost of GPT-5 High, and relatively similar results.

Granted, DeepSeek typically focuses on a single model at a time, instead of OpenAI's approach to a suite of models of varying costs. So there is no model similar to GPT-5 mini, unlike Alibaba which has Qwen 30B A3B. Still, weird choice.

Besides, DeepSeek has shown with 3.2 that it can cut prices in half through further fundamental research.

Output: $1.68 per million tokens.

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news250929

[0]: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/98

I wonder why so many governments sign with a company that, even if the contract says they will not leak information to the US government, is required to yield any information to it if the US requests it, without even being able to notify their client—regardless of the location of the servers themselves.

[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943...

BTW, I generated that list by asking my default search engine, which is Mistral Le Chat: indeed, using Cerebras chips, the responses are so fast that it became competitive with asking Google Search. A lot of comments claim it is worse, but in my experience it is the fastest, and for all but very advanced mathematical questions, it has similar quality to its best competitors. Even LMArena’s Elo indicates it wins 46% of the time against ChatGPT.

[0]: https://mistral.ai/fr/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accele...

One element of comparison is OpenAI Whisper v3, which achieves 7.44 WER on the ASR leaderboard, and shows up as ~8.3 WER on FLEURS in the Voxtral announcement[0]. If FLEURS has +1 WER on average compared to ASR, it would imply that Voxtral does have a lead on ASR.

[0]: https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral

A hand however, is useful because so many manufactured objects have been constructed for their purpose.