Open Source - Interconnected

($) "Death" of Qwen and the “Hundred Claws War”

Chinese Open Source: A Definitive History

Open source used to be a niche topic. China tech also used to be a niche topic. Thanks to AI, the combined topic of “Chinese open source technology” is the topic du jour. It is the story that everyone is trying to understand and

Topics: Open Source• Alibaba•

($) Alibaba's AI Drama

Topics: Open Source• AI•

($) Kimi Kimi on the Wall

Who is the fairest (open weight) model of all?

Topics: Sovereign AI• Open Source•

The Real DeepSeek Moment Just Arrived

Last week, DeepSeek released a new version of its model to much fanfare. Except the fanfare did not come from the model’s performance improvement, hybrid nature (combining both reasoning and non-reasoning into a single model, like GPT-5), or strong agentic capabilities. It came

Topics: Open Source• AI•

From DeepSeek-R1 to gpt-oss

Finally, some positive-sum competition between the US and China

Topics: Open Source• AI• Developer•

China's Structural Advantage in Open Source AI

Not just my words, Ion Stoica’s too.

Topics: TSMC• Geopolitics• Open Source•

Has American Soft Power Peaked?

Tying together DeepSeek open source week, the Oval Office meltdown, and TSMC’s new investment

Topics: Open Source• AI•

($) DeepSeek Diffusion

It’s about open vs closed, not (just) about the US vs China

Topics: AI• Open Source•

($) DeepSeek's Three Idiosyncratic Advantages

Topics: AI• Facebook• Open Source•

($) Llama 3.1 and Its Geopolitical Implications

Allowing output for training, synthetic data use, and more!

Topics: Open Source• Sovereign AI•

($) Tracking Global AI Talent Flow

Topics: AI• Open Source• Regulation•

($) AI Executive Order: Likes and Dislikes

Topics: Open Source• Regulation• AI•

🏛️Washington is Using China to Destroy Open Source

The word “China” has been used as the boogeyman for a lot of tech policy initiatives in Washington DC – some smart, some dumb. The dumbest one yet is the latest push to restrict and regulate open source – the one remaining norm of openness, transparency,

Topics: Open Source• Facebook• AI•

Meta Wants to Make AI “Moatless"

When Meta first released its open source foundation AI model, LLaMA, I thought it was a shrewd move to gain public trust for a social media giant with a huge trust deficit. However, the more I think about Meta’s open source AI posture

Topics: Developer• AI• Open Source•

AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

Last week, I started using a new brokerage service for my investments. It is one of those brokerages that can help produce an audited track record, access to more international exchanges, and other bells and whistles designed for the “pros”. Yet, the UI and

Topics: Meta• Open Source• AI•

Is Meta Becoming a Trustworthy AI Company?

Among all the Big Tech companies who are planting flags in the red hot generative AI arms race, I think the most trustworthy one may actually be Meta. Yep, Zuck’s Meta. I say this because its recently released large language model (LLM), LLaMA

Topics: Developer• Open Source•

Are the Next 50 Million Developers Already Here?

Every year GitHub publishes a “State of the Octoverse [https://octoverse.github.com/]” report to share insights on the state of open source software and developer ecosystem at large. Every year for the last two years, I’ve written a post to share my

Topics: Twitter• Elon Musk• Open Source•

Elon's Twitter and Open Source Algorithm

By now, the entire world knows that Elon Musk owns Twitter. The ongoing frenzy surrounding this deal has reached peak “silly season [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/silly%20season]” – a term political campaign operatives use to describe ridiculous and frivolous media stories near the

Topics: Web3• Open Source•

Polygon: Web3's MongoDB and More

I first heard of Polygon in mid-2021. Friends of mine who were web3 entrepreneurs and NFT artists mentioned it as a promising project, providing a solid scaling solution for Ethereum. After some initial research, I learned that the founding team members were mostly from

Topics: Twitter• Open Source• Elon Musk•

Why Open Sourcing Twitter is Good for Humanity and Business

By now, the entire world knows that Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter. During his first interview [https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM?t=781] after making his intention known, Elon made it clear that he wants to open source Twitter’s algorithm. This announcement was

Topics: RISC-V• Intel• Arm•

Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Semiconductor Edition

Three months after Softbank announced its acquisition of Arm in 2016, Masa Son (founder and CEO of Softbank) invited Jensen Huang (founder and CEO of Nvidia) for dinner at his California mansion. Just the two of them. Among the many things they talked about

Topics: Alibaba• Charlie Munger• Open Source•

Charlie Munger’s New Favorite: Alibaba

It has been more than 440 days since Jack Ma’s infamous speech at the 2020 Bund Finance Summit. (We have the full speech translated in English, Chinese, and Japanese. It’s worth a read.) Since the speech, Alibaba’s stock tumbled by more

Topics: Open Source• Web3• Rest of World•

2022 Outlook: Rise of the "Rest"

As we enter 2022, one new, big theme we will be more focused on is what I call: Rise of the “Rest”. The “Rest” here refers to any country or market that is not the US or China. Admittedly, “Rest” is not the most

Topics: Open Source• China• Alibaba•

Open Source in China: Next Four Years

Last May, I wrote a three-part series that surveyed the entire open source landscape in China: * Part I: the Players [https://interconnected.blog/open-source-in-china-the-players/] * Part II: the Game [https://interconnected.blog/open-source-in-china-the-game/] * Part III: the Trends [https://interconnected.blog/open-source-in-china-the-trends/] Since then, the landscape