interconnects.aitalk🧠 AIA transcribed Interconnects podcast episode where Nathan Lambert and Florian Brand do their quarterly open-model roundup, covering the Kimi K3 release (its coding/agentic performance, $200/mo plan, broken API capacity), GLM-5.2's continued developer traction, Qwen's announced pivot to open-weighting its next flagship, and Xi Jinping's WAIC speech committing China to open-source AI. They dig into why Chinese labs (Kimi/Moonshot, Zhipu/GLM, DeepSeek, MiniMax, LongCat, Ling/Meituan) keep pace with the closed frontier despite less compute — capital efficiency, smuggled/domestic chips, buying external data — then survey the smaller US open ecosystem (Thinking Machines' Inkling and Tinker, Gemma, Nemotron, Poolside, Arcee, Reflection). The back half is a detailed rebuttal of Ben Thompson's Stratechery claim that distillation grows more important as RL scales, arguing SFT-stage distillation from jailbroken Claude/GPT reasoning traces matters less as RL-stage training (which is hard to distill cheaply) dominates post-training, with a side note on a Hugging Face incident where guardrails forced defenders to use a less-restricted model (GLM) to analyze an attack.
QwenQwen3Claude+5
Kimi K3GLM-5.2Qwen 3.8+28
models, training, ai-policy· Added 29 Sep 2026, published 22 Jul 2026
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