A wide-aperture survey of the most concentrated AI news cycle of Q1 2026. In fourteen days: Meta launched Muse Spark under Alexandr Wang and walked away from the open-weight default that defined Llama. Zhipu shipped GLM-5.1, a frontier-class open-weight coding model trained end-to-end on Huawei Ascend silicon with zero NVIDIA in the stack. Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview via Project Glasswing — seeded to eleven named enterprise defensive partners (AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Networks) and explicitly declined GA release over cybersecurity dual-use risk. NVIDIA put Vera Rubin into production at 2,300 watts per GPU with mandatory liquid cooling. OpenAI killed Sora because the unit economics didn't work and redirected the compute to Codex and enterprise agents. Google went GA with Ironwood, the seventh-generation TPU. MemPalace v3.0 hit 21,700 GitHub stars in four days claiming the top of the LongMemEval benchmark (amid significant community skepticism about the benchmark methodology and one of the two named creators' actual technical involvement). Kimi K2.5 cut its input price again.

This episode walks the field lab by lab and chip by chip — US frontier, Chinese open-weights wave, silicon, coding agents, the memory layer — and closes with what got heavier and what got lighter for a CTO making vendor decisions right now. Three Forward Look predictions are logged for accountability.

Honest about which claims are vendor self-reports and which are independently verified. Two single-source claims (GLM-5.1 SWE-Bench Pro 58.4, MemPalace LongMemEval 96.6%) are flagged in-episode as pending independent reproduction.

Runtime: 58 minutes. Coverage window: 2026-03-26 to 2026-04-08.

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AI Disclosure: This episode was produced with AI assistance. Research synthesis and script writing used Claude (Anthropic) under human editorial direction. Audio narration by Microsoft Edge TTS (en-US-AndrewNeural voice).

edited to fix TTS defect.