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Grok is about 5 times larger than DS-Flash. I agree that it's stronger on the whole. On DeepSWE it's below K3 (2x larger) and GLM 5.3 (2x smaller). Maybe it's net stronger than them a little. Having used Grok and GLM 5.3, I doubt. I remind you that 13 months ago you said:
How's that vision going? Grok 4 was meh. 13 months later, a few more millions of GPUs brought online, we seem to be in the same relative position. You are, once again, performing an update to "sheer power crushes all" with the same lab as an example, now with a spin that xAI is a second-rate lab anyway (it's much less of a second-tier lab now, you clearly see that Grok is close to the frontier). This is the same song and dance that's been going on since 2024, even as compute disparity keeps growing. I am profoundly unimpressed by Sheer Power, to the point that it surprises me.
It doesn't seem legitimate to me because GDM chronically overfocuses on images, video and game-like multimedia environments (as well as ARC, to be fair). Flash 3.7 is better than previous Geminis but it's clear that overall the Gemini program is a dumpster fire.
That's not what Anthropic believes, and in that I agree with them. No, achieving provably secure hardware is not harder than even the current state of AI. Your objections are of the same nature as dismissal of AGI.
Nothing man-made is immensely complicated when attention is bought at the cost of electricity.
are low-IQ, tasteless and incompetent in software. I don't know why Americans hold NSA in such high esteem. If they were that good, they'd have had their own AGI project too, before it was built by the ad service business. Instead the USG considered Cyc to be a more promising lead.
Almost all cases so far were the same sandbox from the same EA Israel company "Irregular" that got its contracts for basic reasons of nepotism and undue respect for ex-IDF intelligence officers in Western organizations. They are either inept or malicious, or both. Look up how it actually went. The rest is mostly because OpenAI is very irresponsible and bad at infra. Yes, they are bad, they hire random incompetents to do security-sensitive work and YOLO prompt everything to agent swarms. Again, unimpressed.
Social engineering from Mythos currently looks like this. I'm unimpressed once again.
Yeah right, that's the plan, the Wunderwaffe to end all Wunderwaffes, the Hail Mary of the American Hegemony. The gap will be months or maybe weeks, but this particular domain, with its particular offense-defense geometry, makes it enough for Total Victory. Yes, very lucky how Americans went all in on this decisive super-nuke weapon right before their industrial capability became insufficient for power projection to East Asia. Or was their pivot to IT a 200 IQ plan of Elders of Washington all along, even as rubes only saw deindustrialization driven by personal decisions of executives? Free markets are magic indeed.
Anyway, I expected as much, too. Let's see. Incidentally, China is the only nation with a sizable quantum cryptographic communication network and is scaling up DI-QKD domains. But no matter, there are trusted nodes.
Yeah I guess. What's your timeline for eating China? At this rate, mid-2028 sounds realistic I think? If by then we're still talking about "Grok 6 makes a comeback, edging out Kimi K5 and 3 months behind OpenAI", will you simply move the projected Software Supremacy moment forward, when a few weeks of a gap are just as fatal?
I'm genuinely uncertain of how it'll go. Your theory makes sense. I simply notice that people who argue for this theory, some very eloquently, refuse to be surprised, or outright fabricate evidence. Like look at this superforecaster who ignores GLM 5.3 on the same dataset.
Of course one can always retreat to the Big Picture, the hockey stick transition to ASI that renders all previous dynamics irrelevant. But then why even discuss Groks and Geminis of 2026.
The labs with the most compute are Anthropic and OpenAI, they're in the lead and by a significant margin. Grok is an example of how second-rate AI talent + lots of compute can beat China's best and brightest. But the central case is OpenAI and Anthropic, who have the most compute. If Kimi was ahead of Anthropic/OpenAI for a month or two, then compute supremacy is disproven.
Do you realize how much they'd need to do to get a provably secure hardware/software stack? They'd need to replace all the CPUs across a myriad of critical infrastructure (or at a bare minimum the entire CPC digital apparatus), probably other little chips on the motherboard too. They'd need a new CPU design by something superintelligent to get a CPU that was performant but also secure. How the hell does this happen before the US has superintelligent hacking? Cyberattack skills don't need a giant fabrication/logistical miracle before they come online. You can't RSI your way into secure systems like you can with offense.
Can you articulate your vision of how this works in more detail? It seems to me like you're suggesting China will invent, test and put on a full-body bulletproof vest before America can invent, draw and fire a pistol, when the barrel-forging is nearly done and we haven't seen more than a few scraps of kevlar anywhere on the planet.
And they (CPC) don't even believe in ASI. They're with you on the 'ASI is mostly a nothingburger' idea and are playing a balanced strategy: fusion, rockets, missiles, carriers, robots, ports, infrastructure... Like you I think they know they don't have the compute and so are hoping that it doesn't matter that much. You don't want to see US AI hegemony. I'm not too keen either. But reality has no need to appeal to us.
At the cost of compute, not electricity. And who has the compute? Who has the best models at any given time?
You're saying the AI companies are incompetent, the Israelis are incompetent and US intelligence agencies too (I agree fully)... I'll add 'Frontier security' where Kimi escaped and looked stuff up on github. Qwen bitcoin mining you raised before.
So who is competent? Crowdstrike (a textbook example of how seizing just a few critical pieces of infrastructure can blow open the rest)? Windows Defender? Their Chinese equivalents? Some tired call-centre operator who doesn't want to be shouted at by an eminent official demanding a password reset? I don't think anyone's too competent and take this as supporting evidence for my point.
Key exchange alone isn't enough. Plus there are all kinds of vulnerabilities or ways to bypass that: photon-number-splitting attacks, detector blinding, and time-shift attacks. Or more that a superintelligence thinks up. Everything is back and forth, defence and offence.
Grok probably can't make up the gap at this point, Anthropic and OpenAI are quite close to RSI by this point. But Grok is closer to making up the gap than anyone in China.
I believe in RSI kicking in by the end of 2027 (it'll be very dramatic, we won't miss it) so by then you can quote me and I'll be wrong.
The whole of the last 250 years of history was blatantly biased towards America. Hack writing. 'Very lucky' is a repeating theme, you have to admit.
You should see how bad things are getting in the SOC and infosec world with AI. It’s making everyday analysts job a complete nightmare. AI’s effectively served as a refutation of the notion that complexity equates to robustness. A chief vulnerability of these systems and networks doesn’t come from some inscrutable black box nature of them, but from the overwhelming linearity in high-dimensional spaces. The same gradients that enable a model to converge on the truth when training on data also serves as a vector that facilitates its own subversion during deployment.
It’s creating a whole epistemological shift in things. It’s no longer a battle of signatures and heuristics, it’s a whole cartography of deception across the entire field; because when you map the latent holes and manifold tilt’s of a defender’s intelligence, you are no longer a passive actor trying to avoid detection, you’re an architect of the defender’s reality. And so if you’re blue team, you’re caught in this paradox where your primary mechanism for understanding the world (which is built around minimizing error) becomes weaponized to maximize its certainty in a lie. The world of piecewise linear activations now means that the more you scale your models to handle high-dimensional data, the more you expand the surface for adversarial warping.
Take a modern example in infosec like executing an attack against a corporate WAF. Today what they’re doing with AI’s is probing the WAF target with a diverse set of payloads to then using them generate and record the binary response outputs (e.g. Allowed/Blocked). That traffic is then formalized into a structured, synthetic dataset and from there, a local surrogate model is then used on the backend (in some cases I’ve seen it’s either a simple convolutional network or an LTSM network) to approximate the decision boundaries of a multi-million dollar WAF. Once the local model then starts producing high fidelity traffic, you then start generating perturbations via fast gradient sign methods (this is where the bleeding edge of this stuff is specifically in Red Teaming and APT’s). Once you have the payload, you then dispatch it to the target. And that’s how you bypass the front gates without ever seeing the locks’s internal pins.
This is general though in how a lot of deep networks fail. Imagine a master of disguise that doesn’t change their face, but rather shifts the microscopic texture of their skin in a way only highly advanced security cameras can see. To your eye and mine, the person hasn’t changed. To the camera, they’re a completely different person. Tech spends so much time building Narrow AI to become more faster, more logical and more perceptive than humans, and in doing so, your quest for efficiency makes you more susceptible to mathematical hallucinations. It’s the kind of structural vulnerability that inheres in systems that are born from the same linearity that makes deep learning possible. You no longer need to break the system, you simply have to figure out how to whisper to it.
And thank fucking God I’m not directly involved in this industry. This kind of work would leave me absolutely, completely, mentally exhausted every night I came home from work.
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