Interconnects

Meta shakes up the frontiers, open and closed

This has been a week where the balance of American open-weight models took a step change back toward the frontier. Meta took the lead of this charge with Muse Spark Open,

The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken

I’ve had one too many discussions on the cyber risks of open models — where someone assumes that either banning open models happens in a silo (and bad actors will somehow

Debating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AI

This episode is with Jean-Stanislas “JS” Denain of Epoch AI, who leads their Insights Team and is one of the people I find myself debating the state and trajectory of AI

The current balance of power in open models

I was recently invited to brief a group of Congressional members and staff on the state of open-weight models in the lens of U.S.-China competition. I’m sharing my prepar

Why I still haven’t bought into true RSI

We’re in an era where a few organizations are using thousands of concurrent agents to improve their processes and output. These organizations happen to be just the fronti

One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

As AI became more powerful, it was inevitable that a different, growing group would start to take AI safety more seriously – what we did not know ahead of time, is which

When will average people feel AI’s impact?

Housekeeping: Paid subscribers to Interconnects now get a permanent 40% discount on my book when purchasing at Manning.com. Access the code at the Interconnects perks pag

I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?

There are a lot of criticisms of AI writing, but most of them are focused on more creative, high-voice writing like this blog. Those — including my own piece — often argu

Open models recap: more on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, Xi's WAIC speech, distillation, the open-closed gap, and what's next

Exciting news! My book trying to share post-training knowledge with the world is done and shipping soon. Order on Manning or Amazon. Thanks for the support. It’s currentl

Kimi K3: The open-weights escalation

On Thursday July 16th, Moonshot AI released their latest flagship model Kimi K3. K3 is a 2.8T parameter MoE model which will have its weights released on July 27th. Much

GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents

Housekeeping: Following my “State of the blog” post last week, noting a slight increase in paid features, it’s a good time to remind folks that I offer group subscription

Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake

This post was originally an op-ed co-authored with Kevin Xu of Interconnected for a general, non-technical audience. The gatekeepers — the many media outlets we pitched i

State of the blog, mid-2026

As I navigate my career change after Ai2, I wanted to share my views of how this blog relates to my missions and broader work. In my farewell post, I summarized my three

Frontier post-training recipe review with Finbarr Timbers

As I’ve been recapping fundamentals of post-training to wrap up my RLHF / Post-training book I knew I needed to get Finbarr Timbers back on the podcast to talk about the

Claude Fable 5 and new AI safety fables

Edit Jun. 11: Anthropic changed their silent model manipulation of AI research queries to also use a classifier like the other safety domains. This addresses a key concer

Farewell Ai2

I’m departing the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where I got the great privilege to work on the Olmo models, to grow, to learn, and to have broad lasting impacts. This pos

Open and closed models are on different exponentials

The largest debate that’ll define the future balance of power between the open and closed AI model ecosystems is primarily economic — it’s if users of AI will continue to

Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026

As the years of AI progress go by, it’s been accompanied by a slowly rising tide of consequence. Models are getting more capable, how we work is changing quickly, economi

Notes from inside China's AI labs

Staring out the window on a new, high-speed train from Hangzhou to Shanghai I’m gifted with views of dramatic ridgelines speckled with wind turbines that are silhouetted

The distillation panic

‘Distillation attacks’ is a horrible term for what is happening right now. Yes, some Chinese labs are hacking or jailbreaking APIs to attempt to extract more signal from