In episode 19 of the Interconnects podcast, Nathan Lambert and JS Denain, head of the insights team at Epoch AI, discuss RSI, the China-US model gap, and uneven capabilities. JS believes the evidence in public blog posts from OpenAI and Anthropic is insufficient to prove that AI is about to self-accelerate, but the 2x monthly growth in Codex research spending mentioned in OpenAI's blog post is worth noting; both hold highly uncertain views on where AI is heading.
The Middle East war and rising interest rates are threatening the capital inflows that support AI infrastructure. AWS has acknowledged that drone attacks on its Bahrain and UAE facilities caused permanent data loss for some customers, and most remain offline. Saudi Arabia this month pledged $15 billion in domestic AI investment, Qatar has pulled back, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia are still pressing ahead; Jack Selby warned that Middle Eastern capital accounts for 25% of global AI investment. Meta's Muse is catching up to Instinct, which is reportedly seeking a $10 billion valuation.
The Middle East war and rising interest rates are threatening the capital inflows that support AI infrastructure. AWS has acknowledged that drone attacks on its Bahrain and UAE facilities caused permanent data loss for some customers, and most remain offline. Saudi Arabia this month pledged $15 billion in domestic AI investment, Qatar has pulled back, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia are still pressing ahead; Jack Selby warned that Middle Eastern capital accounts for 25% of global AI investment. M
The Interconnects Issue 24 open source model roundup notes that in 2026 Western vendors shifted to Apache 2.0, while leading Chinese vendors instead tightened their licenses: Zhipu's GLM-5.3 changed from MIT to a custom license, requiring model service providers with annual revenue exceeding $10 billion to first pass a Z.AI security review, and Kimi K3 and MiniMax M3 also attached commercial agreements or revenue thresholds. The models included in this issue are the MIT-licensed Motif-3, Xiaohongshu dots-studio's dots3-note-prev, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (125B-A6B, including 51B n-gram embeddings, using GDN and Qwen Sparse Attention), GLM-5.3-Flash, which is being trialed first on OpenRouter and OpenCode under the name Ox-Alpha, Tencent's Hy4-preview, as well as NVIDIA Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B, Ant Group's Ling-3.0-flash, and Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B.
The Interconnects Issue 24 open source model roundup notes that in 2026 Western vendors shifted to Apache 2.0, while leading Chinese vendors instead tightened their licenses: Zhipu's GLM-5.3 changed from MIT to a custom license, requiring model service providers with annual revenue exceeding $10 billion to first pass a Z.AI security review, and Kimi K3 and MiniMax M3 also attached commercial agreements or revenue thresholds. The models included in this issue are the MIT-licensed Motif-3, Xiaohon
