Futurology Today

I am very interesting in sourcing various inputs from different communities. I am developing a project to help people practice their imagination of the distant but not so distant future.

In May 2023 Google famously said “We Have No Moat And Neither Does OpenAI”. By that they meant they have no future protected business model to justify the tens of billions they are all burning through every month developing AI. Maybe it's even worse - even when they start to build the tiniest of moats, China drains it dry.

Here we see more evidence for that proposition, Tencent's HunyuanVideo, the equal of leading western AI video generation models. Tencent released HunyuanVideo’s open weights and code, making the model readily available for both researchers and commercial uses.

Where will all this end? Many people think AI funding is currently at the irrational exuberance end-of-bubble phase. Will this make it 'too big to fail' when it does? Will we see future public bailouts in the 100's of billions for AI companies?

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Alibaba's Qwen team just released QwQ-32B-Preview, a powerful new open-source AI reasoning model that can reason step-by-step through challenging problems and directly competes with OpenAI's o1 series across benchmarks.

The details:

QwQ features a 32K context window, outperforming o1-mini and competing with o1-preview on key math and reasoning benchmarks.

The model was tested across several of the most challenging math and programming benchmarks, showing major advances in deep reasoning.

QwQ demonstrates ‘deep introspection,’ talking through problems step-by-step and questioning and examining its own answers to reason to a solution.

The Qwen team noted several issues in the Preview model, including getting stuck in reasoning loops, struggling with common sense, and language mixing.

Why it matters: Between QwQ and DeepSeek, open-source reasoning models are here — and Chinese firms are absolutely cooking with new models that nearly match the current top closed leaders. Has OpenAI’s moat dried up, or does the AI leader have something special up its sleeve before the end of the year?