As usual, part 2 of the weekly deals with speculative, regulatory, political and alignment questions.

Xi gave an important speech yesterday, so this post opens with that.

There is talk that Kimi K3 is sufficiently strong that it upends many of these questions. It is clearly a candidate for another DeepSeek Moment, complete with stock drops for Google and SpaceX and (once again in a clear wrong-way move, the same as last time) Nvidia.

Kimi K3 is clearly a very good model, exceeding expectations. Some are saying it is close to the frontier. The Artificial Analysis intelligence index has it at 57, a point ahead of Claude Opus 4.8, two behind Sol and three behind Fable. My presumption is that this number overstates its capabilities, but as always unless and until we have extensively tried the model ourselves, which I do not plan to do, we need to withhold judgment for at least a few days. I will be covering Kimi K3 in its own post at some point early next week.

I have pushed further discussions involving Plan A and related issues into next week, as well as discussions around Demis Hassabis and Google [...]

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Outline:

(01:29) Xi Gives A Good Speech on AI

(15:33) Quiet Speculations

(19:08) Tyler Cowen On Rebuilding The Future

(22:39) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(24:15) Wish You Were Here

(26:55) The Week in Audio

(27:29) New York Issues Moratorium On Data Centers

(30:26) People Just Say Things

(31:24) Rhetorical Innovation