New podcast with @datagenproc of @EpochAIResearch digging into the open questions determining the future of frontier AI! We cover: 00:00 Predictions for RSI 18:15 The role of robotics in an AI acceleration 24:20 How far behind are Chinese models? 27:39 Does distillation explain the gap? 40:58 What Chinese job postings reveal about their labs 48:13 Are open or closed models safer? 58:10 How Epoch AI ticks 1:00:55 What a frontier post-training recipe looks like He's one of the people who gives the best feedback on my writing, so I was stoked to have him on.

Here's what the historical open vs closed data here looks like. Would be useful to have volume too (not just %)!

Over the weekend I had Codex parse 500K arXiv AI/ML papers since ChatGPT to understand which open models are used for research. In 2024, ~30% of papers mentioned an American open model and only 10% a Chinese model. Today, ~40% of papers mention a Chinese (open) LLM, and only 25-30% an American one. Chinese models are the default for research. Chinese mentions are still growing while American open models are stagnating. When looking at this data it's important to remember that papers substantially lag model releases, as research takes a long time. Qwen's steady growth is reflective of this, but so is Llama's lasting power. Some more observations: 1. Qwen has been steadily growing, and today 1/3 of papers which mention any LLM mention qwen. OpenAI's closed models are the highest overall, at ~37%. 2. Llama peaked around April of 2025 at 30% of papers which mention any LLM (including ChatGPT etc). Llama 4 was released at about the same time, and Llama has been declining since. 3. Gemini and Claude are less common than the leading open models, mentioned in 10-15% of papers puts them behind all of Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek. Open models should be and are the foundations of open research. The % of papers mentioning any LLM have been steadily climbing since 2023. | Year | January | April | July | October | | 2023 | 10.43% | 15.39% | 18.69% | 32.18% | | 2024 | 29.70% | 33.93% | 35.70% | 44.25% | | 2025 | 39.23% | 45.28% | 44.94% | 53.52% | | 2026 | 55.49% | 57.26% | 53.14% | TBD Now over 50% of AI papers, from 10% in 2023. Other notes: - Gemma and Mistral hover around 5-10%. - Our beloved fully-open Olmo models have been ~1% since the first release in Jan. 2024. - DeepSeek has a clear jump after R1 in Jan. 2025 - Data derived from the most popular ML arXiv categories: cs. AI, cs. CL, cs. CV, cs. LG, stat. ML Just like our downloads and derivative model data, this is updated daily on the Interconnects Open Model Dashboard.

GLM 5.3 notes and why we should stop being so surprised about these very strong Chinese models (most of this is talking myself through some of my denial -- yes, these models are the real deal). interconnects.ai/p/glm-53-ho…