Given that OpenAI is making noises about merging work with chat (a horrible idea imo), and Work is very similar to Codex... I dearly hope things like these won't have any meaningful cross-polination into the actual work tools.

Seeing that the chat is based on 6.0 and not 6.1 is disappointing. The "Visual and interactive explanations" seems genuinely useful, but 6.1 is just so much better. I wouldn't truly trust the 6.1 with the explanations, but I'd trust them a fair bit more than 6.0. I understand that compute isn't infinite, but tons of people only interact with the chat and having your "things-explainer" be as good as it can be is important when people increasingly treat AI models as the source of truth, or even use them for academic learning and whatnot.

Still, the models will improve, so the visual explainer seems pretty good as an idea / mvp.

The wider ecosystem support is still far from commonplace, but it is slowly changing. iOS 18 wouldn't work with .jxl in Photos, but 27 does. Similarly, quick look and preview works fine on MacOS 27, thumbnails show up properly etc. I also found no issues with .jxl on linux, and image editors are slowly adding support as well.

Plain old jpg will still be everywhere for the next decade, but I'm glad that we finally have superior options with no real downsides, and without all the patent bullshit to boot.

I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.

No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.

Things sure change quickly. 2 months ago you had nigh infinite usage and Sol 5.6 was a significant step forward. Now they're behind in both models and usage, and Astra 6.1 is too dangerous to release or some such (or possibly got embarrassed by opus). What are they even going to show off on today's devday, is a clone of grokbot really that interesting?

I can tap a pipe in a random spot for a lot less than $500.

Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.

Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.

According to geekbench 7800x3d is 2400 single core, 15500 multicore. M4 pro is 3350 single core and 24750 multicore. Yet when I convert video using libsvtav1 with ffmpeg I’m getting noticeably faster performance on the desktop. And that’s with mbp, which doesn’t thermally throttle within 15 seconds.

Is it the 96mb cache? Avx-512? Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?

The bad news is that the original v4 flash was 284B, which was large but still somewhat reasonable for running locally. This one is 552B so almost twice that, so the huge gains in benchmark scores make sense - it's not really flash anymore, imo.

I've no idea about actual performance vs benchmaxxing, though deepseek was fairly trustworthy as far as Chinese models go. If that holds (and if it doesn't think forever, as deepseek 4 sometimes did) it's probably the newest king of the hill amongst open weights models.

It does include vision, and they do something funky with KV cache so it's very efficient: "[...] these designs reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token — roughly 1/4 of DeepSeek-V4-Flash". I do appreciate the high focus on efficiency, but at this point we sure could use a flash-flash version.

@edit: I couldn't make sense what the actual parameter count is, with the addition of Engram memory. To my understanding the 4.1 flash is 552B parameters you want in vram or ram, out of which ~16B is active (8B for prefill). It also includes additional 196B Engram memory which you can put on an SSD. I think.

Assuming that's correct 256 GB memory is insufficient to even load the model at q4 - you'd be 1GB short, assuming you can fill it to 100% (so no mac). You'd also want some for kv cache of course. A 256 GB desktop with some extra VRAM from GPU could run it, but normal consumer boards get real slow once you fill 4 slots so you'll probably want quad channel which is Threadripper or above territory.

There’s potentially trillions on the line, do you seriously expect those companies to adhere to laws and regulations any more than, say, uber?

The only unlikely part is the timeline - your sessions from a week ago probably haven’t made their way into the model. It’ll just take a while longer, and will be massaged just enough so that it isn’t really your exact session word for word so you can’t sure as easily.

Assuming you’re willing to drop a fat stack of cash on the upcoming Mac m5 ultra with 512 gb unified memory, you can even run it locally, quantized to 4 bit. Whether it’s even slightly reasonable, well, my wife would probably skin me alive but maybe yours is more understanding.

Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations.

Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.

Anyway. Routers are such juicy targets, especially since there's less eyes on them than on laptops/desktops, that it's hard to believe there are any which aren't backdoored, be it by China, US, US' middle eastern sidekick, whatever. My question would be: how limited are they to software, like in the article?

You can flash with OpenWRT and Fritz, but to my knowledge it doesn't replace the boot parts. A suspicious bootloader in SPI flash probably isn't difficult to produce, even if it would likely be discovered... eventually. A separate modem / radio processor would be an even bigger nightmare, esp if it's an 5g router - you essentially add a second computer to your router, with its own components and network access, and I think you can't even play around LTE/5g networking as freely as with wifi without bending some laws.

Theoretically you could watch the router from, well, outside the router. But as the article says, it can be difficult to say what's an actual connection and what's uploading your network's data to an uninvited third party. I'm also wholly ignorant what implications it has for things like Wireguard and Tailscale. I assume you're completely pwned if the Wireguard runs on the router, but I don't think it does anything if it runs on your laptop or whatever? Then again, there's a lot more devices in peoples' homes nowadays, and almost all the IoT has pretty much zero security.

I suppose AI will help with some of those things. Tracking every connection made is very tedious for a human, but throw some compute at it and you'll get a much better insight, especially since you'll probably know what to expect out of your machines.

I guess using a mini PC as a router-slash-proxmox-hub would be a safer choice? There's probably many fingers in this pie as well, but my gut feeling is that it's a lot safer than some cheapo box provided by your ISP at the cheapest price they could source them.

This is pretty hefty for a "flash" model, even a 256 GB setup is insufficient at q4 - and q4 is already the worst-but-still-acceptable quant in my experience. The benchmarks look great, especially since GLM tends to be more honest than the average Chinese lab, but you’ll need to splurge to run it at home.

@edit: so many releases that I forgot to math. This fits just fine in q4, realistically the minimal hardware would be 192gb - so blazing fast on double rtx 6000 pro and usable on 256gb unified memory. You could even go with 5bit quant on 256gb.

… you’ll still need to splurge, though.

In regard to Maps: if all you want is a gps, there’s many apps that use OpenStreetMap data. I use CoMaps myself. You download the map(s) you want and it just works, no forced updates or ads or anything in the way of upselling.

>And then another one?

Well so far the price trends towards going down by the zero at the end. Inference isn’t expensive, there’s a whole laundry list of providers to choose from. It’s training (for everybody) and salaries (for US labs) that are expensive.

>and you have to switch to using local models?

Many companies are interested in that, if for no other reason than to avoid uploading secret sauce to we-totally-dont-train-on-your-chats-pinky-promise API endpoints. A mid sized company can cough up $500k for dxg b200 which will be useful for years and years and the only ongoing cost is electricity. Put glm 5.3 on it and it’ll zip along for a number of employees at the same time.

>And then, suddenly, those local models cost an absolute bomb to license, because the companies that bought up the wreckage of the original model creators are trying to recoup their spend?

How are they recouping anything on a mit licensed model released into the wild? There are plenty of models released by "who?" companies and the cost to download those is zero.

>Meanwhile the company is being hit by nuisance litigation from people whose code the bots plagiarised

Any day now

The doom scenario makes no sense in the race to the bottom that’s happening now. China being the other big entity that’s invested in AI makes all the what-ifs about litigation and plagiarism moot; they will gladly offer everybody inference for dirt cheap, if for no other reason that they’d like it if you gifted them your IP that they will then use to outcompete you with their manufacturing prowess.

The genie’s out of the bag. AI is never going away, and we all need to adapt whether we like it or not.