The following article originally appeared on Venkatesh Rao’s Substack, Contraptions, and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The sole athletic achievement of my life came in 1993: winning the IIT Bombay freshman 50m freestyle race with a time of 41s. That got me into the college swim team (it was a bad recruitment […]

The early rapid expansion of AI capabilities that focused on frontier models was largely ushered into the world by a few powerful, US-based AI labs. Open-weight models released from labs in China, early on from DeepSeek, and later from Moonshot, Z.ai, and others, have in part disrupted that dominance. But growing concerns about the concentration […]