Futurology

Despite its name, The 1918 'Spanish' flu pandemic is thought to have first originated in the US. Now it seems history may be close to repeating itself. Throughout 2024 the H5N1 Bird Flu virus has been spreading among US cow herds and is now found in over 500 herds in 15 states. If it spreads to pig herds that is an even bigger problem. Historically, influenza in pigs has been much more likely to cause the genetic recombinations that create human-to-human transmissible diseases.

There's good news, and bad news.

The good news is that mRNA vaccines, in time, should be able to combat any human transmissible strain that arises - though it may take another global lockdown before they are developed and manufactured.

The bad news is that the human mortality rate could be much higher than Covid or Spanish flu. Some variants of H5N1 humans have picked up from animals seem to have near 50% mortality rates. We won't know if we get a milder version until/if it happens.

The worst news? Stopping this spreading to US pig herds will require extraordinary care and vigilance from numerous government public health agencies and everyone working on farms. Just at the moment the public have voted to put clowns in charge of those efforts, who are also talking about shutting them all down. Hubris like this almost begs to be punished by disaster.

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?