Saturday, February 14
Saturday, February 14
China Trained a Frontier Model on Zero US Chips
Zhipu AI dropped GLM-5 early Thursday Beijing time, and the specs are competitive: 745 billion parameters, 200K context window, matching Claude Opus 4.5 on coding benchmarks. Trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips using MindSpore. Zero Nvidia. Zero US hardware. The timing—right before Lunar New Year, after DeepSeek kicked off 2026 with efficiency gains, after months of export control theater—feels deliberate. That wave of Chinese AI chip IPOs (Moore Threads, Biren, Kunlunxin) suddenly makes more sense. The assumption that controlling chips means controlling AI leadership just got stress-tested at frontier scale.
China Trained a Frontier Model on Zero US Chips
Zhipu AI dropped GLM-5 early Thursday Beijing time, and the specs are competitive: 745 billion parameters, 200K context window, matching Claude Opus 4.5 on coding benchmarks. Trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips using MindSpore. Zero Nvidia. Zero US hardware. The timing—right before Lunar New Year, after DeepSeek kicked off 2026 with efficiency gains, after months of export control theater—feels deliberate. That wave of Chinese AI chip IPOs (Moore Threads, Biren, Kunlunxin) suddenly makes more sense. The assumption that controlling chips means controlling AI leadership just got stress-tested at frontier scale.
Money & The Moves
The AI infrastructure buildout is entering a phase where the numbers stop making intuitive sense and start revealing strategic positioning instead.
- When tech giants collectively announce $650 billion in AI spending for a single year, that's compute becoming strategic infrastructure—like highways or power grids. The companies that control the rails will shape what gets built on top.
- Tariff exemptions for the big three cloud providers aren't just trade policy—they're quiet levers that compress margins for everyone else trying to compete at scale.
- When six major AI companies launch a European accelerator together, offering compute credits instead of cash, that's ecosystem capture. The battle isn't just for better models anymore; it's for developer loyalty before performance differences narrow completely.
The money tells you where the power is moving.
The AI infrastructure buildout is entering a phase where the numbers stop making intuitive sense and start revealing strategic positioning instead.
- When tech giants collectively announce $650 billion in AI spending for a single year, that's compute becoming strategic infrastructure—like highways or power grids. The companies that control the rails will shape what gets built on top.
- Tariff exemptions for the big three cloud providers aren't just trade policy—they're quiet levers that compress margins for everyone else trying to compete at scale.
- When six major AI companies launch a European accelerator together, offering compute credits instead of cash, that's ecosystem capture. The battle isn't just for better models anymore; it's for developer loyalty before performance differences narrow completely.
The money tells you where the power is moving.
Chaos & Consequences
South Korean lawmakers grill Bithumb's CEO after the exchange accidentally distributed 620,000 "ghost bitcoins" worth $40B during a promotional event last Friday. An employee entered the reward unit as bitcoin instead of Korean won. Detected in 20 minutes, but 1,786 bitcoins were sold before accounts froze.
Version 2.1.20 is catching heat for replacing every file read and search pattern with a single useless summary line. The community is pinning themselves to version 2.1.19 and asking for a simple boolean config flag instead of the verbose mode surgery that keeps getting shipped.
Yesterday's February update fixes 58 flaws including six actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities—CVE-2026-21513 (MSHTML Framework bypass) and CVE-2026-21514 (Word security bypass) among them. Five rated Critical, 52 Important. The company is also rolling out updated Secure Boot certificates to replace 2011 certificates expiring in June.
Ads are rolling out for U.S. users on Free and Go tiers—Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education remain ad-free. Ads appear at the bottom of responses, matched to conversation topics. The timing is notable: one day after rival Anthropic mocked OpenAI's ad plans in Super Bowl commercials.
Ring's ad for Search Party—the AI feature that mobilizes outdoor cameras across neighborhoods to find lost dogs—continues generating backlash. Critics call it "creepy" and "dystopian," asking: if Ring's AI can scan for a specific dog, what stops it from scanning for a specific person? The feature is on by default.
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