Show intro
Hello everyone, and welcome to Next Token | Beyond Tokens. Next Token | Beyond Tokens is a video podcast covering AI technology, products, and their real-world impact, also available as audio. Our flagship show, Next Token Weekly, is a weekly roundtable with Pan YANG, Guizang, Orange, and Xiangyang Qiaomu, sharing observations, hands-on practice, and different judgments. Not just predicting the next token.Video · 00:00:10–00:00:37¶
Opening from the four hosts
Hello everyone, welcome to the recording of episode three of Next Token. I'm Guizang.Video · 00:01:30–00:01:34¶
Hello everyone, I'm Xiangyang Qiaomu.¶
Hello everyone, I'm Orange.¶
Hello everyone, I'm Pan YANG.¶
Jev: no chit-chat, just structured judgments
Let's get started with this week's Next Token. First up — as usual, we'll follow last week's news and chat until we run out of things to say. The first one is, I think, the hottest new-new model of last week: the TypeSafe AI's Jev model. It's quite different from today's large language models, and its advantage is pretty obvious — you can treat it as a general-purpose classifier, and what it outputs is not what today's LLMs output, like chat or paragraphs of text. It only outputs things like program results. For example, you ask it to pick from a few things, it gives you a choice; you ask it to score something, it gives you a corresponding score; you ask it for a yes-or-no judgment, it gives you that. So it's extremely fast, it can process things in parallel, and it's very cheap. The official price right now is $0.042/MTok for input, and output is free, so for batch tasks the cost is much, much lower. Everyone has seen it — whether you've actually used it, who knows, but everyone should have seen it! What are your thoughts?Video · 00:01:41–00:02:49¶
Right, yes, I just used it. I had it go into my Cola and look at my 300-plus memories, score them, and see which ones it thought were important enough to keep and which could be dropped. It figured about half of the trivial stuff could be deleted — it seems to prefer abstract things — and it organized about 18 important ones for me. Yeah, pretty interesting.Video · 00:02:53–00:03:19¶
It feels like it speeds things up for LLMs and for agents in a lot of ways. I saw another case where someone had the model pick Skills for them. Because they had a lot of Skills installed, it used to be slow to search through them and it ate up a lot of memory, and now they just have the model pick directly, and it returns results instantly.Video · 00:03:25–00:03:46¶
WeChat friend labels and high-frequency judgments
I have a case. I exported all my WeChat-related data earlier, and there are 10,000 friends in there. Previously, for a feature, I had it read my chat history with friends, look at our shared groups, and tag these people. I have 20-plus tags myself — things like, this one's a CTO, this one's a founder, this one does such-and-such. I tried doing this with my local 27B or 35B small models before. First, it was really slow, and second, it was actually pretty inaccurate. What I'm trying now is having it do the tagging work for me. I proposed an approach: I said, after you finish, give me an enumeration or something. It said don't do it that way. I used GPT-6-6 for this, and GPT-6-6 said, here's what you do: have it evaluate each of your tags one by one, and compute whether that tag is yes or no. It's not three modes — one is yes/no,Video · 00:03:47–00:04:46¶
A multiple choice.¶
One is enumeration, one is probability. So it told me to do it: for each tag, return a yes or no. Because tags are multi-select — if you ask it directly to multi-select, it can't do it. That's one scenario. Another scenario: my friends list was full, and I've always wanted a feature where an LLM suggests who I should delete. That's another massive-data problem, and this Jev is actually a great fit for massive, high-frequency scenarios. Because yesterday someone mentioned some scenarios, and I think they said it saves tokens in the middle — but in a lot of scenarios, the examples people show nowadays are like: here's a spot that's 1% of the workload, I optimize it by another 90%, and you only got a 0.9% overall gain. If you don't apply it to something massive and high-frequency, the gains just aren't high enough. So I just had it run through all 10,000 of my friends, gave it some rules, and had it tell me who it suggests deleting — the return is also a probability. And another one: I had it scan all my daily chat conversations — I probably chat with dozens, a hundred people a day — and find the ones where, after chatting with me, there's like a TODO or a highlight, and return and filter those out for me. This one is still running; part of the results have come out. From what I've seen so far, the speed and the results are decent. Later I'll do a comparison with another small model, and we can put out some numbers.Video · 00:04:47–00:06:24¶
Let me say something.¶
These 10,000 — 10,000, how long does it take to run, roughly?Video · 00:06:30–00:06:34¶
Mine hasn't finished yet. 10,000 — that's because, because you can call it concurrently,Video · 00:06:36–00:06:38¶
Right.¶
It's actually fast. You don't have to call it serially. Right, each individual call — ignoring network conditions — is a few hundred milliseconds, roughly, that's the level. You just turn on concurrency. Anyway, I don't have any ordering dependencies.Video · 00:06:41–00:06:57¶
Right, after I saw it I applied right away — didn't expect it to come through that fast, it was approved the very next day. When I tried it back then I didn't think of a particularly good use case; I just got it working. Today I saw some cases online that I think are pretty interesting. For example, someone made an LLM version of Ctrl+F?Video · 00:07:01–00:07:20¶
Semantic search and database queries
We all know Ctrl+F is exact matching — I search for a word and it checks the page or the content for that keyword, exact match only. He turned it into, essentially, an LLM's fuzzy matching: you say "happy", and even if it's not an exact match, it can still find content with a similar meaning. And someone else turned GPT into a database query function — like, "I want to know who didn't come to the office today" — and it can query the records in that database-like setup and return the answer directly. Before, you might have had to query quite a few tables in a database. I think the application scenarios are pretty interesting, but from what I've seen so far,Video · 00:07:22–00:08:02¶
This is basically a function with generalization ability!Video · 00:08:03–00:08:06¶
Exactly!¶
A general-purpose classifier.¶
And I feel like right now, the things that clearly work — people are still exploring, but intuitively, Computer Use is definitely something this can speed up. Because it just reads the DOM tree to decide where to click. As for the rest, I feel people do have some doubts. For example — the architecture isn't public, and there's no good benchmark for its intelligence level — could it judge things wrong? When you have it make this many judgments, how accurate are the results actually? People do have those concerns. That's what I've observed.Video · 00:08:11–00:08:47¶
"No hallucinations" doesn't mean correct judgments
Right, there's a point in their marketing here — they say it has no hallucinations — and there's a bit of a bait-and-switch in there. What they mean is: when we normally use small models, for example if you have one output a strongly-typed result, output JSON, it might output a wrong format, and the program itself, when you build the harness, needs protection — like retries and such. What they're saying now is: I guarantee the returned result definitely won't need a retry. Whether it's actually correct in the middle — hard to say. There are a lot of people building benchmarks to compare now, right. And one more thing I saw: lots of people in the community saying, "that's nothing, we can reproduce it." From what I've seen in the community so far, nothing reproduced has turned out better — not in quality, not in speed. The ones that claimed to be reproductions eventually all got called out. But on the other hand, I think open-source replicas will come fast.Video · 00:08:47–00:09:48¶
There are already 6 projects today. Let me see — someone said there are 6 open-source projects, all replicating this.Video · 00:09:53–00:09:59¶
But a lot of them don't seem to work!¶
For example.¶
Right, and it should be easy to train!¶
Right.¶
They said they'd open-source it — at the time they said they'd open-source it later.Video · 00:10:39–00:10:43¶
Will they open-source it?¶
They said yes. I remember the founder mentioned it in passing. They also wrote up their own limitations. They said, first, multi-hop reasoning and complex coreference are weak — the parts our Thinking models are good at, this is all pretty bad at. Like, if you need it to reach a result that takes two hops, two steps of thinking, working through a few layers of relations to draw a conclusion — it can't really do that.Video · 00:10:44–00:11:10¶
System 1, right. Intuition — just give the answer directly.¶
Right,¶
Right,¶
And then.¶
So it pairs really well with other LLMs,Video · 00:11:14–00:11:17¶
Right, they're complementary. And the old problem: unreliable at numeric computation, counting, and date handling — you still write a program for that,Video · 00:11:17–00:11:25¶
Still have to call tools!¶
Right, call tools. And it tends to understand things literally — it can't understand metaphor. The "happy" you mentioned, it can understand that. But once there's a complex metaphor, it can't understand it. Slightly more complex, and it probably can't.Video · 00:11:26–00:11:41¶
Have you noticed that when people think about these issues, we're kind of back to — remember 2023, when everyone had LLMs do arithmetic problems and count things? Nobody asks SOTA models to do that today. But today this new little model comes out, and people immediately go "this doesn't work, that doesn't work" — when your use case may not even fit its positioning. You're forcing a use case that doesn't match what it's built for,Video · 00:11:41–00:12:08¶
That's what they wrote themselves,¶
Right.¶
It's the parts they themselves found problematic in their own testing. There's also something about context — with irrelevant context, accuracy drops. If you pre-filter and clean the data before you have it make judgments, accuracy may be a bit higher. I still think it's the problem from before: it does have accuracy issues, and it does have a hallucination problem — it's just that their "hallucination" isn't the kind we mean,Video · 00:12:09–00:12:36¶
Right.¶
And alignment, or prompt-injection risk is fairly big — presumably they didn't do much work on that, didn't do much processing there.Video · 00:12:37–00:12:46¶
Right, I have a question. This model itself is pretty simple in function. If they keep going with it, what's the moat? What else can you even build on top of something like this? I honestly haven't figured that out.Video · 00:12:46–00:13:04¶
I think multimodal is a really important thing,Video · 00:13:10–00:13:14¶
Right. Agreed!¶
For data retrieval and — a lot of what we do now goes through retrieval and recognition. The diversity and accuracy of its inputs, the accuracy of its outputs — I think all of that matters. Especially if you can solve fast matching and processing for audio, video, and images — which are extremely token-hungry and time-consuming — the prospects are big.Video · 00:13:14–00:13:34¶
You mean bringing in multimodality, next, down the road,Video · 00:13:38–00:13:41¶
Right.¶
Right. Come to think of it, there's something that's been stuck in my head all week — borrowing from some of Liang Wenfeng's earlier remarks, where he said something like, we won't do multimodal, we think language models are powerful enough. Everything that's come out since has basically slapped that down.Video · 00:13:42–00:13:56¶
You can't skip it. Skip it and no one uses you — and the money still has to be made.Video · 00:13:58–00:14:00¶
Right.¶
I also saw a demo of controlling all kinds of software on a computer by voice. Before you even finish speaking, it opens it for you — like "open Notepad", you're still talking and it's already open. The response speed is very fast. I never figured out how it converts that into driving software and driving the interface.Video · 00:14:04–00:14:24¶
In there — there are two models working together, with a realtime one,Video · 00:14:26–00:14:29¶
Right.¶
Something essentially like Computer Use — it's just speeding up Computer Use. Realtime computer operation has been around for a while.Video · 00:14:29–00:14:34¶
All those tasks are probably paired with a program, or with an LLM, or with other models.Video · 00:14:34–00:14:41¶
The thing about Computer Use is it's essentially a finite set: buttons — of all those buttons, which one to click. It just becomes a conversion like that. The model supports 255 options, so for open-ended sets it doesn't do well. They have a fan site collecting all kinds of uses called Jevable. There's a demo on it — everyone knows there's an animation type called Live2D, where you have parameters that define a character's motions and expressions. Live2D — this model can take one sentence — like "you smile" — and immediately generate a bunch of parameters, making the Live2D character move.Video · 00:14:45–00:15:29¶
So fast. The website,¶
Right,¶
Found it — Jevable.com.com!Video · 00:15:36–00:15:39¶
Then I also had this model judge the 10 most valuable apps on that site. It made the call,Video · 00:15:36–00:15:45¶
Love it.¶
It said the most valuable first one is helping it set thresholds. The model has a threshold thing, right — 1-to-10 scale or 1-to-3. You feed the data to the model, have it run a threshold by itself first, and then its judgments get really accurate.Video · 00:15:46–00:16:00¶
Isn't that like playing Heroes of Might and Magic? What's that genre called — the grid-walking ones, with just a few options,Video · 00:16:06–00:16:13¶
Turn-based tactics.¶
Right,¶
That's such a good fit.¶
It played 66 lines and never died. Anyway, it's just getting started. I understand this model surely has plenty of problems, including that officially it hasn't gone through RLHF, so it won't have those biases. But there are some problems — like if you ask it certain slightly sensitive questions touching on different things — it might have a hard time, might not know, so it'll run into those issues too.Video · 00:16:23–00:16:57¶
It always has to give you an answer.¶
Okay.¶
Right, so.¶
The site Orange recommends is called Jevable.com.com, right? Jevable.com.com.Video · 00:17:03–00:17:08¶
Everyone can go try it out.¶
Using the model to filter covert ads
Another case: someone built a tool for blocking covert ads while you scroll Twitter or Weibo. Overt ads — can't you just block anything with an AD label at the start? This thing can block ads in real time as you scroll: each time you feed it one tweet, the moment it loads, it blocks it for you. There's also one that blocks soft ads based on subtitles. That especially plagues us in China — there's no requirement to mark ads on screen, so a lot of the time you get ambushed and have to skip manually. It gives you an option directly,Video · 00:17:18–00:17:54¶
You give it an article and it can also pick out the AI-slop words in it. It feels like a really fast little tool an LLM can use. I think the positioning is great: just treat it as a System One Model.Video · 00:18:11–00:18:27¶
Right, like Qiaomu said — it's a function with generalization ability,Video · 00:18:29–00:18:34¶
Exactly. A smart if-else.Video · 00:18:35–00:18:43¶
Because before, look — you either had a model, or you had a program. This swaps certain parts of a program for a model. Yesterday someone called it a "joint model" — I thought that metaphor was pretty interesting.Video · 00:18:35–00:18:51¶
Pretty interesting indeed.¶
Why is everyone chasing this model so feverishly? So much of it is people desperately hunting for scenarios to use it in. I don't know what its breakout point is, or what idea it hit for people. Besides being fast — and I think speed really matters — what else?Video · 00:18:58–00:19:15¶
I think it's one thing,¶
Cheap.¶
Once you get swept up in the wave, a lot of people naturally follow the herd and go try it. Another thing: the concept is genuinely novel. AI hasn't had something in a long while that everyone can understand, is new, and you can pick up quickly. And another: it's fast, and when it's fast, it's easy to build demos. That gives it a viral advantage — it's easy to make those demos that amaze everyone, and the spread of demos further amplifies the herd-mentality problem.Video · 00:19:19–00:19:49¶
Agreed!¶
Those two numbers sitting right there, and it—¶
100 times faster, 100 times cheaper — that's 10,000 times!Video · 00:19:59–00:20:03¶
Every time I watch his video—¶
He asks, why build models at all.¶
Reaching AGI with just these three types?Video · 00:20:22–00:20:27¶
You've got a novel now — like the 42 in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 42 is the ultimate answer. Actually, that could work.Video · 00:20:27–00:20:31¶
42.¶
Look at what's written on their site: 193.6x faster, and 444.6x cheaper.Video · 00:20:38–00:20:43¶
As long as you can convert it into a question,¶
Right.¶
Like, should rates go up or should they go down — give it a 0-1-2, and it can pick out a number.Video · 00:20:49–00:20:55¶
Plugging the new model into your existing agents
Here's what I did: I went straight to my GPT-6-6 and said, TypeSafe AI just released a new model — first do your homework on it, go read and understand it yourself, since it's not the latest knowledge. Then I said, write it up as a doc and put it in a project. I just started working inside that project. I started discussing scenarios with it — what models to make, prototypes — just let GPT-6-6 run with it.Video · 00:20:57–00:21:24¶
The main thing is that it depends heavily on other things; its standalone use cases are pretty limited. And once you assemble it with today's agent models, integrating this model into an agent is actually fairly complicated, because its request types and patterns are completely at odds with today's LLMs. If you want to add it to the existing AI stack, it's still a bit of a hassle. So a lot of the time people just build new websites and little tools — there's no quick way to plug it into the AI they already have.Video · 00:21:24–00:21:56¶
Let's see how long it takes for a real open-source replica to come out — see which episode of ours it shows up in.Video · 00:22:02–00:22:10¶
It can be replicated even without open-sourcing. Honestly the principle is just next token — it's simple, I think. And the author's core belief is that this thing doesn't need to go through language-based alignment — it hasn't been influenced by humans,Video · 00:22:11–00:22:25¶
More objective,¶
A relatively objective probability model.Video · 00:22:34–00:22:37¶
Another interesting case: someone drew a grid for it — maybe 24×24 or 30×30 — and had it predict in parallel what color every pixel should be, achieving something like Stable Diffusion or diffusion-model-style image generation. It can actually draw some pretty decent stuff. I think that represents another kind of possibility.Video · 00:22:39–00:23:02¶
It shows the essence of intelligence is the same,¶
Right, you give it—¶
It's all probability.¶
Give it the 26 letters and have it choose, and it can speak. The key is still the level of intelligence.Video · 00:23:12–00:23:16¶
I'm stammering a bit. And what was the other one?Video · 00:23:16–00:23:19¶
Orange just mentioned a lot of things — I bet a lot of people haven't actually read its official site carefully. A lot of what Orange said is on the site; there's a huge amount of information there.Video · 00:23:23–00:23:33¶
There's also a doc.¶
For example, a 5T-plus-parameter model needs however many cards, whereas this model is probably tiny.Video · 00:23:45–00:23:51¶
True.¶
Right.¶
Right,¶
There it is.¶
I don't believe any of this — no matter what they use, I don't believe in taking a small model and directly LoRA-ing it or whatever these days.Video · 00:24:22–00:24:29¶
Right, I think it must already be different at the pretraining stage; there's no way it purely relies on an LLM finishing the job through training,Video · 00:24:29–00:24:35¶
They talked about that too,¶
They said it's mainly in the data — the core of all their work is probably in the data!Video · 00:24:37–00:24:43¶
With an LLM, you need to constrain it to output in a format. And once you add that constraint, the LLM's intelligence drops.Video · 00:24:44–00:24:53¶
Anything else anyone wants to say?Video · 00:25:01–00:25:04¶
We've been going quite a while already!¶
Multimodal: why audio and video should be understood together
Okay, let's look at the rest of this week's news. Still going by models, hardware, and other stuff. On models: Qwen released a Qwen 3.8-Omni-Flash, an omni-modal model supporting native audio-video understanding, reasoning, and tools. Capabilities are close to the 3.8 Flash over here, 1 million context, and video output cost down 89% versus the previous generation. Feels like it referenced — or whatever — something similar to what we talked about last week, that cost-reduction approach the 3.8 Flash here used for video understanding?Video · 00:25:07–00:25:50¶
What are these Omni models even for?Video · 00:25:52–00:25:55¶
I think the core is, for example, automated ads — automated image creation for video ads — and things like arranging short-drama videos depend heavily on this kind of model. Especially the persimmon stuff!¶
Versus pure video models — because every single one of its functions, we can find a separate model for,Video · 00:26:12–00:26:19¶
Right.¶
So what's the point of making it an Omni model?Video · 00:26:19–00:26:22¶
Because you can't find separate models for it,Video · 00:26:22–00:26:24¶
It's just that I—¶
There's no way to understand it holistically. You know, a short drama or a feature film — audio, video, every frame and cut — is a whole. If you understand them separately, converting everything into text annotations and feeding it to a smarter model, you lose a lot of information. At the annotation level — that is, the understanding level — it can be really bad. It's like using it is the same as not using it; you get a very mediocre result.Video · 00:26:24–00:26:49¶
Someone told me it could be much better for annotation.Video · 00:26:57–00:27:01¶
Annotation isn't just annotation either. If you build image-and-video agents, you really need this model.Video · 00:27:02–00:27:10¶
Like replicating hit videos — very well suited.Video · 00:27:10–00:27:13¶
But its audio-video isn't a SOTA audio-video model.Video · 00:27:15–00:27:19¶
It can't generate video,¶
Can't generate, right,¶
It can only understand.¶
It's understanding.¶
It can only understand.¶
Still — understanding and breaking down hit videos, isn't that just annotation?Video · 00:27:22–00:27:25¶
A cheap understanding model doesn't have that many uses,Video · 00:27:25–00:27:28¶
You could think of it that way.¶
Some scenarios do save quite a bit of money,¶
Absolutely necessary.¶
Very profitable scenarios, especially ads,¶
Right.¶
Quantization and local small models
So Gemini remains what everyone really needs to this day — in this area there's almost no beating it. Second item: a company fine-tuned Qwen 27B and did a ternary quantization — 9x smaller than full-precision Qwen 27B, only 5.6 GB. They say it retains 98.2% of overall performance, and it's even stronger than before on multimodal and long-horizon task calling, and it can run locally on a single 5090. That's pretty important, because the 5090's problem is its VRAM is too low — a 27B simply couldn't fit before. With multiple cards, forget it. A single 5090 — and for this kind of inference, 5090 performance, I think, is sometimes better than Apple's MLX optimizations. Quite needed for local tasks — even a 32 GB Mac Studio could actually run it.Video · 00:27:51–00:29:05¶
Higher,¶
Right, mainly because its memory is small, one,¶
Thank you.¶
Bandwidth a bit lower, right, so its compute is strong,Video · 00:29:32–00:29:35¶
Post-00s, I think. It takes young people,¶
Right!¶
They're livestreaming MiMo V2.6's reinforcement learning — the training process as a dashboard with all the metrics and dollar amounts: how much money each model has consumed so far, what the cost is, and they keep adding metrics and data. That's pretty valuable for training teams.Video · 00:29:56–00:30:14¶
There's not much informational content in it — watching other people burn money feels good and it spreads well, but you can't really glean much from it.Video · 00:30:18–00:30:25¶
There is something to it. At least it lets you see complete progress, not just benchmarks. If you only see the final benchmark, the middle might be watered down, but this kind of continuous process is relatively more believable.Video · 00:30:25–00:30:44¶
And they have a scrolling board on there with text telling you when they're going to terminate training, when they'll retrain, what went wrong with the last training run, and what they'll change for the next one. I think that's quite meaningful, quite interesting. And livestreaming does burn money at a very high rate,Video · 00:30:48–00:31:06¶
Is that a first, too?¶
People never really had a sense of how much model training actually costs. When you watch it tick up $20-30 every single second, you realize it really does cost — and that's just compute, not counting staff and all the rest.Video · 00:31:08–00:31:22¶
Put another way: it's not a SOTA model, so marketing has to carry it.Video · 00:31:23–00:31:28¶
Next up is — they had this before, I can't recall the name — they released something called Arrow? Is that what it's called?Video · 00:31:33–00:31:41¶
SVG, icons, and design workflows
Arrow 2 2 — a model that draws SVG, extremely strong. Find its demo: a pelican riding a bicycle, 10,000 times better than what all current models draw, tons of detail. You watch it outline the feathers stroke by stroke, and the bicycle wheels are wild too. I think lots of models have never gotten this part right. Drawing icons — drawing the SVG icons we normally have in interfaces — even GPT-6-6 or other models don't draw them well. Drawing icons is painful for designers too: you work in a tiny grid in Figma, tens of pixels by tens of pixels, tracing Bézier curves with the pen tool, or cutting and boolean-operating basic shapes. A skilled hand is fast at it, but very few people are good at icons. It's hard — 20 icons might take a whole day.Video · 00:31:43–00:32:55¶
Right.¶
I think this kind of thing goes fast — SOTA models just train the capability straight in. And also,Video · 00:33:06–00:33:13¶
It can be done.¶
And — offering it in the form of a standalone model — few people would spin up a separate model just to do this. I think the best form would be offering it as an MCP or something like that.Video · 00:33:15–00:33:25¶
I think it's fine — it can be packaged as an MCP. Like just now,Video · 00:33:27–00:33:30¶
Right.¶
Right.¶
See, remember I told you — your PPT Skill is missing images, it's all text. With this thing paired up, it would be divine,Video · 00:33:58–00:34:06¶
It does have images — it calls an icon library and such, but drawing richer things is more troublesome,Video · 00:34:06–00:34:13¶
Right,¶
With it, definitely.¶
If you pair it with an MCP, wouldn't that be awesome,Video · 00:34:14–00:34:17¶
Right, that'd be great!¶
And it's vector,¶
Right.¶
I think vector really matters, especially for print publishing.Video · 00:34:19–00:34:21¶
Right — otherwise how do you scale it up?¶
Like when we wrote books back in the day,Video · 00:34:22–00:34:24¶
No worries.¶
You need illustrations, and image generation is definitely unreliable for that. There was a site called Napkin — Napkin as in the tissue — that turned selected text into vector graphics, but with very limited layouts. If this kind of model gets widely used, I think there's a lot of imagination for the print publishing industry.Video · 00:34:24–00:34:44¶
And big-screen displays.¶
Could the OS come with it?¶
I feel like Astra probably also used data made with Astra. Astra itself has some ability — you give it a photo and it can draw a line-art version with code, quite close. I feel Astra is accelerating; next it will make a lot of heavy models extremely fast, because making data becomes easy.Video · 00:34:51–00:35:11¶
I think—¶
Using GPT-6 Astra to make data and train small models
This is what I saw this week: Astra has given us a new arbitrage space — use Astra to create new things. For example, use Astra to fine-tune small models for specific domains. Today's Astra, together with Fable, is already capable of this. Before, you needed a professional algorithm-and-training person to tune a small model yourself. Now with Astra's help, you give it the requirement, it sets up all the data and the whole infrastructure needed for training, and then trains it for you from 0 to 1, done!Video · 00:35:19–00:35:51¶
Right — this is lifting yourself up by stepping on your own right foot!Video · 00:36:36–00:36:39¶
Right!¶
Is there a node past which [the others] can never catch up,Video · 00:37:03–00:37:06¶
That's also an inflection point.¶
Because we've talked about this before — if there's a huge, incredibly strong overseas model researching and iterating and improving itself, everyone else might just never catch up.Video · 00:37:06–00:37:18¶
I think there may be a singularity. We used to talk about that moment — once it arrives, say, when self-sufficiency in the whole training process hits 80%, progress might explode overnight and no one can ever catch up again.Video · 00:37:19–00:37:33¶
I think the base point may already be here,¶
But—¶
We just don't know it yet,¶
I've already bet on the right one.¶
About there.¶
What people chase now is ASI. And then— you were saying—Video · 00:37:59–00:38:03¶
Right, so people's understanding will shift quickly: these technologies, this engineering — none of it is a moat. What people used to talk about — what you have in hand today, what you're building, whether as an individual or a company, being the moat — that got discussed relatively little, in small circles. I think very soon it becomes a question every person and every company has to face.Video · 00:38:36–00:39:00¶
Which brings us to his hottest part — I think the hottest is the last section, about,Video · 00:39:06–00:39:11¶
Hitler?¶
About a communist cyberpunk-style 2077 oligopoly?Video · 00:39:13–00:39:17¶
Right, ask it. Just ask. Probability.¶
You could feed it this article, feed it that final question and—Video · 00:39:22–00:39:26¶
Right, I think — both outcomes are possible.Video · 00:39:30–00:39:33¶
Nobody knows! And the funny thing is — it's decided by humans!Video · 00:39:33–00:39:36¶
In the end it might not be decided by technology — that stuff might have nothing to do with technology,Video · 00:39:36–00:39:40¶
Also a dice roll, then?¶
In the end it comes down to how people decide.Video · 00:39:42–00:39:45¶
Right.¶
Haha.¶
Everyone agreed to slow down!¶
Right.¶
They were just about to ship a new model.¶
Right,¶
Shipping right away.¶
On one hand saying "we agree," on the other saying our 4.8 will crush everything,Video · 00:40:16–00:40:20¶
Shipping, benchmarked against 2.5—¶
There's no way you people are stopping.¶
Then this Monday — this Monday at some All-In event or something? On stage, phoning Jensen Huang: ship it for me right now.Video · 00:40:27–00:40:34¶
Next: StepFun released three voice models, including the realtime-interactive StepAudio 3 Realtime 3 Realtime, StepAudio 3 ASR Max 3 ASR Max, and full audio content generation.Video · 00:40:48–00:40:59¶
Realtime voice and Computer Use
Feels like a ton of realtime models shipped this week — everyone is crowding into this lane. I think the time has come. On the other side, Computer Use is about there too — more and more scenarios of operating the computer through voice interaction. I've already tried the ASR models in this space myself, because we make a podcast and need transcripts — I set up the environment locally. After testing, I think it's better than what had been SOTA on my end, Qwen ASR — mainly stronger at recognizing proper nouns, and better at handling spoken language too. I think there are still a lot of low-hanging fruit in speech models. So many talented people went off to work on LLMs, nobody cares about this area — invest a little and you still get big gains.Video · 00:40:59–00:41:43¶
Next is Google — Google also released voice models. It follows Gemini's updates: when Gemini updated to 3.8 Flash, its voice models updated to 3.8 Flash too. One Live and one Thinking — it's two, right? One for real-time conversation, the other for deeper, more complex tasks. It talks while it reasons — it can keep talking with you while reasoning, and once the reasoning result comes out, it naturally carries the conversation back to that result.Video · 00:41:58–00:42:28¶
That said, I think for quite a long stretch, very few people will actually bring in realtime interaction models. A lot of the examples are on mobile, and phones — including the Apple — are constrained by the OS; it's hard to do what you want, so it usually happens inside apps.Video · 00:42:28–00:42:46¶
Inconvenient.¶
I think the next big breakout point might be realtime models plus Computer Use capability, further completely liberating us. Before we started, didn't I post a video in the group — operating the entire computer purely by voice, completely hands-free. I think large-scale application here might arrive any moment now. Speaking of which — there's more; I'll bring it up when we get to hardware: the Doubao phone. Later.Video · 00:42:53–00:43:26¶
Embodied AI and zero-shot tasks
Figure released a Helix 2.5 2.5 robot model, mainly improving robots' zero-shot task success rates — things like tidying rooms, folding towels, making beds — raising the zero-shot success rate of those tasks from 9% to 56%. Feels like progress in embodied intelligence is still very slow, especially on the brain side.Video · 00:43:44–00:44:04¶
Right, its video demo is decent. When I watched the video it got a little scary at the start — it's picking socks up off the floor. Mainly in China its robots are all remote-controlled, right — it slowly picks things up, and it's quite interesting.Video · 00:44:15–00:44:31¶
Right. Right, right.¶
With this thing, it can adjust joint parameters in real time. Like the steering angle and force of hydraulic or electric-assist systems,Video · 00:44:46–00:44:55¶
Right!¶
Output power — adjusting in real time to what level?Video · 00:44:58–00:45:02¶
Right.¶
Right, but I think it's a good thing,¶
Right.¶
A good thing — because the embodied models used to have no visible hope; progress was extremely slow.Video · 00:45:17–00:45:23¶
It further shows that once you pick the right base model, you just crush everything else, right.Video · 00:45:24–00:45:29¶
Very important, right! And another thing — lately I,Video · 00:45:31–00:45:34¶
So—¶
You were saying?¶
For embodied, this feels pretty important, because everyone has been waiting for this intelligence. Honestly didn't expect this: they've always been choosing among many models, many companies, and in the end it's OpenAI that comes and solves it for them. They're still selling hardware — doesn't matter — unless OpenAI also builds its own robots.Video · 00:45:38–00:45:58¶
Weren't they partnered with them before,¶
I think I saw a news item,¶
Didn't they stop working together later?¶
Makes sense.¶
I seem to have seen news that OpenAI is also doing embodied. Think about it from another angle: for a base-model company to improve model capability further, it has to devour data domain by domain. Who used to bother doing 3D? Who bothered doing Computer Use? OpenAI's capability rose on the back of these domains, pulling its capability up again and again. And sometimes you can't even tell whether it's the model's intelligence rising or its capability rising — the two have become hard to separate. Anyway, it just keeps getting stronger,Video · 00:46:13–00:46:47¶
Right, and I also have that—¶
I have one more case. Just now, Fang wrote a very rudimentary assisted-driving algorithm. He modeled it for a car — the car makes quick judgments based on current road conditions, like traffic lights. I think that's also very important; it opens up a new path for assisted driving. Assisted driving needs very fast judgments and at the same time very high intelligence — before, those two were seen as hard to combine. And this also requires multimodal support. Once multimodal is supported, I think there could be enormous progress.Video · 00:47:00–00:47:31¶
After Vibe Coding fills up your drive
Qiaomu raised an issue earlier — we finished discussing models, and this fits right in: as model capability keeps growing, everyone will do more and more Vibe Coding. Disk space runs out. Lots of people have this problem — storage was already expensive, and we already had those small-but-beautiful apps taking up space, so things were already stretched thin, and then Vibe Coding came along. AI madly produces content for you and madly opens Worktrees, and for many people there really isn't enough. My previous computer was 512 GB — I thought, how could I ever use that up? Once Vibe Coding took off I was cleaning daily, and finally switched to 2 TB. This 2 TB machine is three months old, and just now I looked — 1 TB is already gone.Video · 00:48:07–00:48:59¶
My 1 TB is already at the point where I have to start deleting things.Video · 00:49:02–00:49:05¶
I did a complete reinstall yesterday. I couldn't take it anymore.Video · 00:49:06–00:49:09¶
I'm okay — I recently did my own cleanup. My old computer was 512 GB, nearly full; after cleaning, it's now at 200 GB. I found three things—Video · 00:49:12–00:49:24¶
Still not enough!¶
Your terminal keeps every package — installers and all kinds of packages all get kept. One is Chrome, including the browser — when an agent uses Chrome there's a huge cache, 60 GB or more. Feishu — any app with a built-in browser, have the agent run it once — takes even more space than WeChat. There's a cache, and that's easy to delete — just clear the cache.Video · 00:49:27–00:49:56¶
A lot of the time it's never used. Wouldn't even go look things up? I took a look—Video · 00:49:56–00:50:00¶
I've started shopping for drives lately,¶
My main— go ahead.¶
External storage, NAS and all that — I've started stocking up.Video · 00:50:04–00:50:08¶
I got some too. For us content people, it's often video. I checked — raw video recording specs are huge; record for 10 or 20 minutes and 20, 30 GB is gone. And these are your masters — you can't delete them, but not deleting them doesn't work either; you can only deal with them later.Video · 00:50:09–00:50:28¶
Then the other day I remembered an antique — my family later bought an external DVD burner, we still have it. I dug it out thinking, could some cold-storage stuff be burned onto discs? Then I looked it up — a DVD is only 6.9 GB.Video · 00:50:36–00:50:50¶
There are big ones now. I remember watching MediaStorm — they also store data on optical discs.Video · 00:50:55–00:51:01¶
A DVD is only 6.9 GB, and a hard drive today is several TB. We record one podcast and a DVD isn't even enough.Video · 00:51:01–00:51:08¶
Filled right up, yeah.¶
Say you use a NAS — how does that solve it?Video · 00:51:16–00:51:18¶
Today—¶
Like a NAS — but doesn't your network need to be fast too, otherwise there'd be latency.Video · 00:51:18–00:51:22¶
No need — the NAS is on your LAN.Video · 00:51:22–00:51:24¶
There's LAN too?¶
Intranet. I was looking in the wrong place.¶
If that doesn't work, just plug in a Thunderbolt 5 straight to the NAS.Video · 00:51:28–00:51:31¶
I saw someone say that when buying a Mac Mini there's a 10-gigabit Ethernet option, and they didn't pick it at the time and deeply regret it. So going forward, it feels like 10-gigabit networking should be standard, and the bigger the drive the better — even 1 TB isn't enough. I saw lots of replies saying 1 TB isn't enough either. When my 512 GB was nearly full I cleaned daily, got sick of it, and gave Astra a command: I want to recover 100 GB or more. It went directory by directory searching for me — in the end it did manage to free that much, but it nearly deleted every app I regularly use. I figured there was no point, so I just did a complete reinstall.Video · 00:51:31–00:52:06¶
Right, speaking of which—¶
So—¶
Remember that.¶
So a bunch of people are waiting to use foldables — tapping the top of a foldable — starting at 256G, custom builds from 20,000 up.Video · 00:52:43–00:52:49¶
1TB.¶
By that logic, in this era — is cheap online cold storage useful? I don't know if it's a business.Video · 00:52:56–00:53:04¶
Right.¶
Volcano Engine is doing it.¶
That's one meaning. Like, I don't buy a NAS at home, or I have a NAS, but the NAS is local hot storage — I don't need RAID. And online there's cheap cold storage. What's cold storage? What I want isn't instantly downloadable — I can only see what files are stored, the file names. Like, if I want to retrieve that volume, I send a request, and within 24 hours it lets me access it — that's cold storage. It could actually be made into a service. I just don't know if it's too niche.Video · 00:53:18–00:53:49¶
Indeed.¶
24 hours — I don't think people today can wait,Video · 00:53:58–00:54:00¶
I think the core—¶
People today want it in 24 seconds.¶
That's hot storage then, not cold—¶
No — users don't care,¶
Because it's not—¶
Then you have no user demand at all.¶
Because the price differs by 10x — say a netdisk at 68 yuan a month, now you make it 6.8, same capacity?Video · 00:54:09–00:54:16¶
Isn't the biggest chunk of a netdisk's costs traffic? This lowers traffic costs too, since there are fewer accesses, so traffic is naturally lower. It might download—Video · 00:54:19–00:54:29¶
Right, this—¶
It might download something enormous in one go, which could be expensive.Video · 00:54:33–00:54:37¶
Isn't it said that storage stocks keep rising — turns out it's because of data center construction. I feel consumer drives are slowly not enough either.Video · 00:54:38–00:54:43¶
Right.¶
Hard drives are another category — they're not the same as memory. Not the same as SSD either!Video · 00:54:46–00:54:51¶
You mean storage — it doesn't refer to SSD-type storage?Video · 00:54:53–00:54:57¶
Right, quite—¶
None of it is enough. Not good. Not good at it.¶
Because I think this could be a big revenue line later. Think about it: we've been in the digital era for twenty or thirty years — how many digital works and artifacts from the first 10, 20 years need archiving? Maybe every few years, the capacity we need to archive grows 10x. The digital content the few of us produce in one year might equal the total of the past several years. There will definitely be storage demand going forward. Buying a NAS at home is expensive too, drives can fail, and you need backups. To back up you have to buy two drives — the price effectively doubles. So, like I said, if there were a place that would keep a cheap cloud backup for me — pay a few dozen yuan a year for several TB — I'd be willing. Right now my Apple subscription is the 2 TB plan — 2 TB for the whole family at 68 yuan a month, and it's nearly full. On the next tier I might have to pay 200-plus a month for a few extra TB.Video · 00:55:15–00:56:35¶
Right.¶
Not available in China, right?¶
Not in China — not in China or the EU.¶
Right.¶
Making promo videos and soundtracks with code
There's one more thing we haven't covered. This week I had GPT-6-6 make a promo video for my software — it made the music too. I thought it had found it on some open-source music library site. Then it made two, and I noticed the music was different each time, and both synced with the video content. I asked how the music was made, and it said with Python. I can't hear that it was made with Python. Before, AI-made electronic music was very monotonous — a few notes repeating forever, or a few drums thrown together; this one follows the rhythm of the whole video. I always assumed it was open-source music downloaded from a music library site — turns out it wrote it in Python.Video · 00:56:56–00:57:36¶
Impressive.¶
Right.¶
When it writes music, it first writes a score, then converts it into music with MIDI.Video · 00:58:00–00:58:04¶
Right. Right.¶
It sounds great — indistinguishable from something written by a person.Video · 00:58:06–00:58:08¶
Right.¶
I don't think it kills them — not yet, anyway,Video · 00:58:43–00:58:45¶
Right.¶
They still each have their strengths. The problem is its capability is getting scarier and scarier. You can see that every time Claude ships a feature, the videos are made by Claude itself — and those videos keep getting richer. I'm sure the people shipping features didn't put much effort into them, but the videos keep getting better and better. Astra is the same — the other day I had it try based on my codebase, and it did a great job. The music mentioned just now was made by it too; the components were off the shelf.Video · 00:58:46–00:59:16¶
The absolute rise in intelligence means it can do everything. Those models or pieces of infrastructure we used to build specifically in some domain for a specific task — SOTA models, as their general intelligence rises, can eat all of them. Right.Video · 00:59:21–00:59:45¶
Right — this is something it learned on its own. It's definitely not from application training data, because the value of that is too low; nobody would prepare that data for it,Video · 00:59:45–00:59:54¶
It must have generalized it itself.¶
It just broke through that wall on its own.¶
Speaking of which — it can operate MIDI, and the basics it can definitely operate. So for example, the Journey to the West theme — what's it called, "Yungong Xunyin" — could you have it make its own version of Yungong Xunyin?Video · 00:59:56–01:00:08¶
Right.¶
Right — electronic music, it can remix,¶
Right, right,¶
It'll mix it for you,¶
Right, right, totally,¶
It's all pure digital.¶
Rearrange and rework all the great tunes in history.Video · 01:00:18–01:00:23¶
Right — it can play you music while painting visuals, achieving a real-time video effect entirely from the code level. But it's still fairly slow,Video · 01:00:26–01:00:41¶
Wait — next month, when we can't burn through all our tokens, let's save some and make a demo.Video · 01:00:41–01:00:46¶
Let's try. Basically the whole video—¶
I saw a Vibe Coding friend of mine, Xiao'er — he has the model generate dynamic sound effects based on a character's vector-space position, and the results were spectacular. You can actually use this approach to make all kinds of visual effects — the mapping between music and characters,Video · 01:00:48–01:01:07¶
Lately I keep getting fed a category of video: SVG and motion effects set to music as the visuals. You've probably seen lots of those creative websites — like grass growing along with the music. The grass is actually SVG-ified, a Bézier-curve animation, also generated from a single sentence. Like a sailboat — entirely through one one-shot SVG, drawn and grown line by line, with waves drawn around it using those lines. The sailboat moves, drifting with the wind — it's all stuff like that.Video · 01:01:10–01:01:54¶
Really, the new era has its new-era artists — using the technology of the new era for all kinds of artistic expression.Video · 01:02:00–01:02:06¶
Expression, right.¶
Right, expression.¶
Right.¶
Before, he could only — he couldn't use it, he could only keep using the original. Now it's been rewritten directly — a rewritten CUDA — and since it's already very efficient, a lot of people have started writing with it.Video · 01:02:26–01:02:39¶
Replicating a CUDA isn't that hard anymore,Video · 01:02:51–01:02:55¶
Remember in our very first episode we talked about AMD? They've now started using Fable to write their whole driver suite, and just this week DeepSeek and Zhipu both started using models for inference acceleration. NVIDIA can't hold this moat much longer. Jensen Huang is clear-headed — he knows this perfectly well.Video · 01:02:55–01:03:21¶
That's why he won't let those three giants keep suppressing the development of other open models — because they can do it and others can't, and the gap keeps widening. Next: Volcano Engine released a car AI assistant, the Doubao cockpit assistant. The main feature is phone-car interconnection. You can remotely control the car and check its status from the Doubao app, and push trips to your phone. Car controls, navigation, assisted driving — the car's whole set of functions can be executed through Doubao. For now it's first partnering with Roewe's Jiayue 07, and SAIC Audi is joining too—Video · 01:03:21–01:03:59¶
These must all be the software-weak car makers, the weaker of the bunch, right,Video · 01:04:03–01:04:08¶
But honestly, both the AI capability and the phone-car interconnection capability are not strong right now. The smart-cockpit part, I think, is far behind on cars — definitely far behind computers, and what it can do in the car is far, far behind phones.Video · 01:04:08–01:04:24¶
You know what? That Brad Qiang — he's working at SAIC on the Doubao project.Video · 01:04:29–01:04:34¶
I know.¶
Didn't know — aren't there tons of complaints,¶
No.¶
"Can't use this, can't use that"?¶
It's selling like crazy!¶
Well, can't help that,¶
But the thing is—¶
Right,¶
Right.¶
I think it's only you tech-circle people who think this thing is clunky here and broken there. The masses just see "AI", the marketing kicks in, and it sells out.Video · 01:04:56–01:05:05¶
There are plenty of scenarios?¶
It was pretty big.¶
You mean me—¶
I think given the phone's sales— feels like—Video · 01:06:32–01:06:36¶
What sales? Do you know its numbers?Video · 01:06:38–01:06:40¶
Go check the news!¶
What's the main thing? One is that it's not expensive — the phone is overall pretty middle-of-the-road, all the specs are adequate. Its price, I saw, is 6,500?Video · 01:06:45–01:06:54¶
Look — sales broke 100 million yuan in 1 second. And pre-orders were 370,000 units. Very hot.Video · 01:06:59–01:07:05¶
The price, I think, is right — there's no AI premium; it's just a normal phone price,Video · 01:07:27–01:07:31¶
Right. Right.¶
I don't think it's so much about being more low-level or being able to do things others can't — it's more about concept delivery and how it's demonstrated. The other day I suggested you watch Chen Baoyi's video — he did a Xiaomi HyperOS 4 demo showing how the system connects the person, the car, the home, and all things. Watching that thing, you realize you don't know how to use a phone. The comments all say "Lei should have him present it — enough of the other guy; talking about all those specs is useless." I think it's a communication problem.Video · 01:07:45–01:08:16¶
Its own services, right!¶
Food delivery and such. In the end it comes down to competing on services — letting you enjoy all services through simple interactions, while having built out the full layout of those services itself. The ones who could fight it are maybe Tencent and Alibaba, but both of those are slow.Video · 01:08:26–01:08:40¶
It's mainly that they own the content — consuming content matters a lot.Video · 01:08:46–01:08:48¶
Right, exactly.¶
Charging.¶
Didn't we already cover this? Right,¶
Done discussing?¶
Right, I—¶
Didn't we already cover this?¶
I think later it becomes something — a different thing. He shipped the phone, and he split the phone assistant out. When AI isn't good enough — not just ZTE or the others — once those players see this, they'll go do some cooperation too. He's turned it into a service.Video · 01:09:03–01:09:20¶
Right,¶
Otherwise you get throttled,¶
Skip it.¶
What's wrong with that.¶
And then we're done—¶
Don't mention that name?¶
Don't. Right.¶
Voice input products and realtime feedback
Done — and we won't mention keywords, otherwise the comments blow up and it's over. Next: other things. First, Tencent also released an AI input method — I think this thing will clash with WeChat Input Method.Video · 01:09:39–01:09:52¶
Code?¶
Right.¶
It's not an input method — it's a standalone app, right, that Chatterfly.Video · 01:10:05–01:10:07¶
Right.¶
Isn't it Chatterfly?Video · 01:10:07–01:10:09¶
Chatterfly — it competes with Typeless. And NetEase Youdao's what's-it-called, Bage is another one.Video · 01:10:09–01:10:16¶
It's just that he released one himself.¶
Bage, I installed it and then uninstalled it. I thought about it: it's not that much simpler than Typeless, and it's not as good as WeChat Input Method's smart voice input. I use WeChat Input Method now, which isn't built-in, and I don't think I need to keep three. Keep one input method and one Typeless-type thing — one of each category and done. I tried it, and there was no wow effect. And one thing I really can't stand: when you're dictating, it doesn't show what you're saying in real time — say 2 minutes, 3 minutes, you can't see anything, and then it all comes out at once. That's a bad experience for me.Video · 01:10:19–01:10:56¶
Anyway I've barely used it lately.¶
What I mainly use now—¶
Cut the free tokens.¶
As long as WeChat Input Method's voice input gets a proper-noun dictionary, I don't need anything else!Video · 01:11:23–01:11:29¶
Everyone says it's really good.¶
Right,¶
It should have that too.¶
Great interaction, no problem. Is it just not in there?Video · 01:11:39–01:11:44¶
Tencent's new Chatterfly lets you add a Skill. After you finish a stretch of speech, it can process it with a specific Skill — I'd call that an innovation, I guess.Video · 01:11:47–01:11:58¶
Shandianshuo did that long ago.¶
Had it ages ago.¶
But in a way — what Shandianshuo—¶
Although it did it very early,¶
But in a way,¶
it overcomplicated it,¶
In a way, they overcomplicated the product,Video · 01:12:08–01:12:11¶
Actually—¶
Right.¶
It's actually out of step with the times. The trend now is making things simple — all those prompt templates and such are being simplified.Video · 01:12:13–01:12:20¶
Right.¶
The core issue is that its Skills are essentially still prompts. You can't operate the computer, can't execute tools. As a voice input method, it can't execute tools either — it's still just prompts. Polishing things with prompts — how do people put it? If you know, you know! Also, Claude Code finally supports AGENTS.md — I'd been maintaining so many separate copies,Video · 01:12:21–01:12:46¶
About time. So stubborn.¶
It still hasn't supported Agent Skills,Video · 01:12:58–01:13:00¶
Agent Skills still isn't supported — next step, hopefully they get that handled, otherwise it's still painful.Video · 01:13:00–01:13:06¶
Right — didn't its OpenRouter call volume just lose first place to OpenAI for the first time?Video · 01:13:18–01:13:21¶
It's mad subsidies, mad discounts.¶
A lot more,¶
Right, but this time it—¶
A lot more.¶
The reason it could overtake actually still comes down to GPT-6 Astra-6 Astra. And Astra doesn't get a discount at OpenAI, which is pretty impressive.Video · 01:13:35–01:13:43¶
Right, and Computer Use is just too strong,Video · 01:13:55–01:13:57¶
Right, the built-in browser!¶
Right.¶
On Computer Use it's out in front by a mile.Video · 01:14:19–01:14:26¶
It has genuinely become my operation entry point. These days I don't open websites or apps myself for a lot of things.Video · 01:14:26–01:14:33¶
It's like the operating system,¶
A lot of it goes straight—¶
You now—¶
Right,¶
Spread it all out, just use it — you can use your computer entirely through it, no problem at all.Video · 01:14:38–01:14:41¶
Issue commands through it.¶
What you said ties back to what I said last week: models and their homegrown agents are becoming more and more interdependent. If the model is bad, the agent can't push it; if the agent is bad, the model can't be pushed either. Right.Video · 01:14:58–01:15:15¶
I tried it today — I found it so damn good,Video · 01:15:23–01:15:26¶
Brutal.¶
Right!¶
It can load cookies, history, extensions — everything — it's basically a full browser now. Last time I was saying, should I look for a third-party browser,Video · 01:15:26–01:15:34¶
Right.¶
Like ego (lite) or Tabbit, something like that—Video · 01:15:37–01:15:40¶
Wiped out.¶
Now I'm thinking it's probably unnecessary anymore — it's almost—Video · 01:15:41–01:15:44¶
Right.¶
Before, logging into websites could be a hassle — now you just install 1Password for it. My 1Password is all authorization-based — no plaintext passwords ever appear; it authorizes with the key directly, it clicks once and you're logged in, very secure. My credit cards are stored in 1Password too — for payments and such, just authorize it and it can fill them in for you.Video · 01:15:46–01:16:09¶
I used Safari for a long time, because I have choice paralysis — Chrome has too many extensions, Safari has basically none, so I just stopped using Chrome entirely. A big reason for using Safari was that it's tied to Keychain — I keep user passwords and such in Apple's Keychain. Now it's been split into a Keychain and a Passwords app. Chrome used to be unable to touch the Apple system's Keychain; now Chrome can directly read all the passwords and accounts in the Apple macOS keychain. I think beyond the 1Password features, for the basic experience, Chrome can already handle it on its own.Video · 01:16:18–01:17:09¶
Right, it has that kind of thing itself.¶
One more thing it shows: the Codex team was quite committed to swallowing the browser — this is a previous decision landing. And there's another question I keep mulling: does anyone else feel that with Codex's built-in browser mode, the screen size no longer fits? I think we need a wider ultrawide.Video · 01:17:12–01:17:42¶
Wider, right.¶
Keep a 16:9 browser, and add space on the left or right for chat and a session list. I've been wanting to buy a 5K ultrawide lately.Video · 01:17:42–01:17:52¶
It fits well — splitting the screen is easier too,¶
Right.¶
Splitting screens on 16:9 right now is a real struggle — no way of splitting feels right, especially painful when browsing the web,Video · 01:17:59–01:18:05¶
This way you get the original 16:9 browser experience while using the agent.Video · 01:18:05–01:18:10¶
So gross.¶
Got flamed to death, right?¶
But the experience is terrible,¶
But the logic is wrong.¶
Session list on the left, chat in the middle,¶
The experience is terrible!¶
And the browser on the right. Right.¶
Right, but it has no AI, so—¶
Also bad. Hard to use.¶
I was ready in advance!¶
Right.¶
Whatever. Don't rush—¶
Right,¶
Don't rush — everyone is converging on the same thing,Video · 01:18:42–01:18:45¶
But like, you tap Moments and it pops up over there, and then on the left there's another notification for you to tap. You haven't gotten used to that behavior, so it feels like nothing changed — very weird.Video · 01:18:45–01:18:56¶
Right, can't figure it out.¶
Have you used it for a while?¶
They didn't do it well.¶
Right,¶
Well, I've used it for a while now,¶
It didn't do tabs.¶
I think it's great.¶
Maybe your screen is wide. I feel it takes up space, and it keeps un-docking — sometimes it's docked together, sometimes you accidentally tear it apart.Video · 01:19:05–01:19:11¶
When its browser isn't showing, you have no idea where it will pop up. One moment it's the side browser, the next moment an independent browser window appears.Video · 01:19:17–01:19:24¶
Right, there's no predictability!¶
Right.¶
I know what problem you're all hitting — there's a setting: open with the external browser, or open with the internal browser?Video · 01:19:27–01:19:34¶
Isn't that—¶
That's not the problem.¶
Right.¶
Say you've opened one — like a WeChat official account article,Video · 01:19:55–01:19:57¶
Right.¶
I know. It just covers it, right.¶
Codex multi-account and workspaces
It doesn't cover it — right now the two logics coexist, and you don't know which one will show up when. I hit it several times this afternoon while organizing information. Moving on: Codex's built-in connectors now support logging in with multiple accounts. Say you've connected Notion or Twitter MCP — the Notion or GitHub connectors now support switching and can bind multiple accounts. Say your company uses Notion and you personally use Notion too — you wanted both your company and personal Notion logged in so it can read that content. Now it can read both; it can read content from multiple accounts in one go.Video · 01:20:07–01:20:42¶
These connectors are on the MCP side, nothing to do with the browser. The connector itself supports multi-account login.Video · 01:20:51–01:20:58¶
These aren't things you couldn't think of — it's that they move so fast. While other agents are still working on the basics, they're already going deep into these very fine-grained things. And then—Video · 01:21:17–01:21:29¶
It iterates together with the model, the model's environment — so this place is basically already in a self-accelerating state.Video · 01:21:29–01:21:37¶
Their engineering is just too weak.¶
A villain trending toward a full-on supervillain image.¶
I'm curious — the AI browsers of earlier years all seem to be gone now. Like, I use Chrome and occasionally ask Gemini something, at a very low frequency. The original selling point of the second browser seemed to be that you could have an AI assistant — that whole form seems to be fading away.Video · 01:21:54–01:22:12¶
Right, you're right.¶
Don't know—¶
I think what Codex lacks now is tab and project management — managing browser tabs and projects together, in a linked state. That's needed. Its tabs are like Dia's — didn't Dia's former designer and interaction designer move to OpenAI? They worked on Atlas before, and now presumably on the browser — they'll definitely have thought of this.Video · 01:22:33–01:22:56¶
Right!¶
In the end we'd use the browser to watch videos,Video · 01:23:12–01:23:16¶
Man, I feel like—¶
No other use for it.¶
Right, just consumption — beyond consumption,¶
An interface?¶
I don't know what that one's about — it's pretty hot too.Video · 01:24:11–01:24:15¶
Right now Silicon Valley is hyping this concept — personal agent. Tonight?Video · 01:24:16–01:24:21¶
I think it will definitely get there. I firmly believe it!Video · 01:24:21–01:24:25¶
Always-on agents and multi-platform content distribution
Need a use case. A few days ago in Hangzhou I met Tw93 and asked him how he uses Grok Bot. He said he has Grok Bot automatically do multi-platform marketing promotion for him — promoting his Mole cleaning app. Because he has a dedicated computer running it around the clock, scheduled to visit niche forums in Europe and the US, then handing it to Grok to judge each forum's vibe. Some forums love indie devs telling their stories, some prefer knowledge-heavy, practical sharing. It posts based on the vibe, and it also judges when people are slacking off to time the posts. He only needs to provide the content.Video · 01:24:29–01:25:05¶
Doesn't that wipe out a bunch of AI marketing companies?¶
Yes.¶
Right.¶
Right — using it is using Browser Use, Computer Use and such? Isn't this delivering outcomes?¶
Right.¶
That template sharing of his—¶
Right — made into a service, I think a lot of people would pay for it,Video · 01:25:42–01:25:46¶
So I effectively gain independent software-promotion capability — way more powerful than a Skill!Video · 01:25:53–01:25:59¶
Start delivering outcomes!¶
What it writes has a nicely human flavor.¶
And then—¶
Just in time.¶
Next I'm handing our website's growth task to it. See — Qiaomu isn't waiting for you anymore; just have Xiangyang Qiaomu do it,Video · 01:26:12–01:26:21¶
Haha,¶
It might not adapt well domestically in China. Can't log into anything.Video · 01:26:23–01:26:25¶
And everything is—¶
Right.¶
Xiaohongshu blocks you at the first cut.¶
No need for domestic — there's no Internet in China.Video · 01:26:29–01:26:32¶
You can translate it into English and compete abroad.¶
No internet meaning—¶
Coding and Office: two work modes
Sure, I'll try it together with you — I'm interested.Video · 01:27:18–01:27:21¶
Next: Grok Bot's supported voice — voice conversation capability. I think for low-cost agents, low-usage-cost agents, that's pretty important. Next is Claude Code — as mentioned, Claude Code launched Projects in beta. In one conversation it automatically handles the work — there's no more concept of chat conversations. Only the concept of projects: once you start a project, all your chats live together, and you don't switch chats yourself — it splits threads on its own, runs them in the cloud, and passes context between the different conversations. You can step away from the computer and it keeps running in the cloud. Feels like they're heading toward Grok Bot.Video · 01:27:23–01:28:16¶
Feels way too complicated!¶
But — there are just too many services; you don't even know which one to go to.Video · 01:28:27–01:28:31¶
No idea how to use it — the concepts are too complicated.Video · 01:28:32–01:28:36¶
Right. Right.¶
Right, you—¶
He always—¶
Either natively in the cloud,¶
Spin off a—¶
Or natively local,¶
Hasn't been updated in ages.¶
No way around it.¶
Feels like it hasn't had any big changes in forever.Video · 01:28:52–01:28:56¶
Feels like they've already given up on treatment.Video · 01:28:52–01:28:56¶
Right,¶
Why though?¶
Right.¶
Cloud processing.¶
No need to split,¶
Right,¶
I think there's no need to split.¶
So it's a big trend — simpler and simpler. Very few people truly understand what Work, Code and those things mean.Video · 01:29:15–01:29:25¶
No need to split by task — don't carve the interface into different entrances by task type and make people switch.Video · 01:29:27–01:29:33¶
Conversations, sessions—¶
Right. Right, conversations!¶
Now it's chats and projects.¶
Right.¶
Cloud Macs and agent execution environments
Enterprise data and log boundaries
Then there's NVIDIA and other top US companies — concerned because Anthropic introduced a rolling 30-day usage-log feature in June. It saves your chats and information — whether you're a B2B company or a consumer user, there's no opting out; it retains your conversations on a rolling 30 days. Combined with the report a few days ago — they're all banning employees from using Fable 5, or banning employees from using Fable models.Video · 01:30:49–01:31:22¶
Right,¶
Who would dare use it?¶
Haven't even gotten to use it!¶
Seems like nothing much.¶
A bit underwhelming.¶
Barely made a splash.¶
Haven't used it yet — anyway, yesterday I upgraded all my systems to 27,Video · 01:31:55–01:32:00¶
And it looks a lot better too,¶
Back then it still—¶
The way I see it — when Liquid Glass first came out it felt like a disaster, but now that the design language has grown on us,Video · 01:32:05–01:32:13¶
Speaking of which—¶
with the patches added on, it feels okay.Video · 01:32:13–01:32:17¶
You can adjust the transparency, the blur level.¶
The higher the blur, the more readable it gets. At maximum it's the original frosted glass.Video · 01:32:20–01:32:26¶
Right, I turned it up a bit.¶
I'm on the default middle setting!¶
And that's all the news. There's some more stuff — about Liu Shengyu's article mentioned earlier, it spread a lot, including on Twitter; I saw lots of people sharing it.¶
Stacking traffic hacks?¶
Anything like that can go viral.¶
I think it's more than that. He himself evokes resonance — an algorithm engineer that brilliant,Video · 01:33:27–01:33:34¶
The very top of the top,¶
even he feels like he's about to be replaced — the resonance is extremely strong.Video · 01:33:40–01:33:44¶
And when someone like him comes out and says this, people accept it — or rather, people truly agree!Video · 01:33:46–01:33:51¶
And then—¶
Because I heard from a friend who often chats with people inside DeepSeek — their verdict on Claude Code was like, where's the engineering in this? The harness is terribly written. That's how they see it.Video · 01:33:58–01:34:11¶
Because of the DeepSeek team's background — they came from quant, so their engineering is stronger than other model-algorithm teams. Look at DeepSeek's whole journey: they consistently invested a bit more in engineering relative to other model companies, and that bought them huge gains over their peers.Video · 01:34:12–01:34:30¶
Right — like your 4.1?¶
Right.¶
Inference speed, cost, and price.¶
What we ran into this week was leaning on the top models—Video · 01:34:42–01:34:46¶
Truly outrageous.¶
to smooth this thing over again,¶
Right, exactly. And then finally there's a text—¶
It's still the same question: what is our value going forward? I don't think this is a pessimistic question — it's that we have to think and find our new position and value.Video · 01:34:55–01:35:06¶
Right — what are you going to do?¶
There will always be something. Like we just said about art, about the music bit — there will be new-era artists who can wield the technology.Video · 01:35:17–01:35:27¶
There are already lots of them — people doing expression, doing abstraction, including content and commercial content. I think this group is already pretty clear.Video · 01:35:29–01:35:38¶
Judging from how the short-drama industry developed, I'm very optimistic — it shows that as long as people have good tools of expression, they can be incredibly imaginative and create things completely unlike anything before.Video · 01:35:40–01:35:53¶
Right — see, before, to make this kind of thing you needed imagination, then you needed to write scripts, then you needed to make video, you needed to edit footage. Now AI handles everything behind it for you — as long as you have imagination and are willing to get hands-on, you can make a film today. Right — aren't people talking about the Americans obsessing over that American-style drama made by Chinese creators? Those two people have never been to the US, and they made an American drama that's hot in the US.Video · 01:35:55–01:36:23¶
AI dramas and content production
Indeed — lately every week there's a new hit American-style series, AI dramas, including new AI IPs, with very good numbers. It's not short-lived: click in and you'll find the whole dataset is very stable. Some may not be super hot, but people keep watching. Since it's stable, there's some ability to monetize, or other avenues.Video · 01:36:25–01:36:46¶
One more thing — this week there was the Pinglu Canal news story, right? I noticed a phenomenon: this batch of Pinglu Canal short and mid-length videos is all really high quality — every single one is a gem, no matter whose shop produced it. There are all kinds of forms: standard blockbuster-style ones, like Planet Research Institute style, and ones made by all the big accounts. On one side there's editing capability, material-gathering capability, storytelling capability; and there are AI versions too — like turning the Pinglu Canal into a Nezha-style animation, AI short dramas — the results are all excellent. Through this event, one of my takeaways is that our whole society's capacity and scale for creating content is already completely different from six months ago.Video · 01:36:52–01:37:44¶
Right — back to the problem: the time for consuming content is limited,Video · 01:37:57–01:38:01¶
Yes.¶
Hey, and the even more brutal part—¶
AI in R&D and human oversight
We'll have to grind on growth and on delivering results — because creation has already been max-leveled for everyone.Video · 01:38:06–01:38:11¶
Last one: a frontier AI lab released an AI development-velocity metric — anyway, there are three metrics. The first is the degree of AI's involvement in its own R&D — the ASI automation trend index we keep mentioning. It classifies the company's internal R&D by human job categories and assesses automation levels. As of August 2026, it says Claude has not yet achieved autonomous operation in any stage, but plays a leading role in 26% of R&D work, and sits above the AI-collaboration level for over 90%. The second measures the ability to supervise AI agents — that safety stuff of theirs. The third measures how compute is allocated, especially the share of compute going to AI research. They say they put 6% of compute — about 12% of AI-R&D-driving compute — into safety work. Feels like apart from the first one,Video · 01:38:11–01:39:17¶
Right — it feels like nobody believes what they say anymore.Video · 01:39:21–01:39:28¶
The second and the third go back to the old narrative — they've started fear-mongering again.Video · 01:39:21–01:39:30¶
Let's not get into it.¶
The first one is still pretty interesting. Okay.¶
How about we stop here for today?¶
Stop here — it's 10 o'clock today.¶
This is our first episode recorded like this.¶
Go record it online?¶
Recording online.¶
Online recording. Okay.¶
Right.¶
So — goodbye everyone!¶
Aren't you going to wait the 60 seconds?¶
Hello.¶
No wait — first say goodbye to everyone. Okay, goodbye.Video · 01:39:56–01:40:00¶
Bye everyone.¶
See you next episode. Bye!¶
Bye.¶
Bye.¶
See you next time!¶