The 5-Minute AI Weekly Recap: Realignment Week

Two big things happened last Friday, right after the time that I was recording the weekly recap. The first was the SpaceX IPO, which we had seen an initial bump as it went public on Friday afternoon. But then the second, and arguably much bigger deal, was Anthropics suspending access to Fable V and Mythos V in response to a new US export control directive. Both of these contributed to or were part of the realignment this week, and for sure the dominant theme was Fable Fallout.

Now to fast forward to the conclusion. Throughout most of the week, we haven't necessarily had all of the best signs that Fable V was coming back anytime soon. I think a lot of people expected that with the effective banning happening at the end of business on Friday, the White House had an interest in getting it back online by Monday, but that certainly wasn't the case.

Now as I record this on Friday, June 19th, we are getting some positive signals, but at this point there is no resolution. Instead what this week was mostly about was another lesson of why people and companies need to think about their relationship with AI models differently. Now this had already started because of growing token costs at the frontier. One of the biggest themes for the last few weeks has been people exploring alternative models and alternative model architectures such as routers.

The fact that now models are seen as powerful enough that they can be shut down at random by the government adds a whole new category of risk of overbuilding your strategy around one single model. And a lot flowed into that vacuum this week.

One category of that was Chinese models. Indeed, one of the big critiques from people who are worried about this move from the White House is that it seems to be a complete boon for open source or open weight Chinese models that people were already looking to because of cost benefits.

but now are potentially looking to because they can run them locally or have more control. Z.ai meanwhile timed their release of GLM 5.2 perfectly. It did well on all the benchmarks, but more than that, it seems to for many be passing the vibe test. Leighton Space summed up the average experience with these new buzzy Chinese models, writing, In the AI news business, there's a bit of trepidation about talking about open models.

They come out guns blazing, looking pretty on notable benchmarks, and then a month later they fade into disuse like they never existed. GLM 5.2, however they say, seems to pass the vibe check of being a frontier model that just happens to be open. They pointed to a tweet from Jeremy Howard, who is, as they put it, not one given to hype who said, GLM 5.2 is a marvel. It is at least as good as Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. It's super fast and expensive and not too verbose.

It responds with nuance and judgment and handles long context very well. I've never experienced an open weights model like this before. Matt Pocock wrote, Folks who are running GLM five point two, how are you doing it? What harness and provider are you using? Getting FOMO about an open weights model for the first time. AI educator Riley Brown wrote

Spent a lot of time using GLM 5.2. I've always been skeptical of the open models as they've never lived up to the benchmarks and announcements. This is the first model that passes the vibe check. This feels like a deep seek R1 moment that will push the Frontier Labs into releasing even better models. Time to buy a beast computer to run these models on. But as I said, it wasn't just Chinese models that were filling in the fable gap, but also new model architectures.

Open Router, for example, released their new Fusion API, which they say can achieve fable level intelligence at half the price. Basically the way that fusion works. Is when a prompt is sent into Fusion, it's fanned out to a panel of models in parallel with a judge model that reads every response and then selects the right model for the job.

This is an example of the type of approach that people were already exploring because of token efficiency and cost needs, but now in the days of government AI shutdowns, seems even more valuable.

Summing up the feeling of the shift overall is Mike Obignano from USV, who writes, For the first time in around three years, it feels like the AI table has been flipped over. Yes, the labs and hyperscalers will have the highest chance of resetting it before everyone else, but there is now a window for a new ecosystem to emerge.

A rebel alliance, basically anything that gives people and enterprises powerful intelligence while maintaining tight incentive alignment. Now, this is interestingly where SpaceX story intersects as well.

SpaceX's big pop on Friday extended into this week, and holding aside the merits of the company's valuation, it gives them leverage and Elon is taking advantage of that. Specifically, SpaceX actually followed through with the acquisition of Cursor, which could have some pretty big implication for models.

Cursor indicated that it's got a full model, not just a post-train of a Chinese version coming, so I'll be looking for signals about how they plan on competing. Now tied up with Elon and SpaceX, they could go two very different routes. They could continue trying to live at this Pareto frontier between efficiency and performance. Or Elon's eyes might get big again and maybe they try to actually compete for state-of-the-art, even if it's expensive.

Meanwhile, the one other area of fable fallout that was on display this week was in geopolitics. As European leaders at the G7 were caught between begging for access to Mythos slash Fable while also trying to plan a new AI sovereign path. What to watch for next week then? Well of course there has never been a more obvious what to watch. Everyone just wants to know if we will get Fable back. And in terms of what to work on or build this weekend, the conversation about loop.

And the different way of interacting with AI they represent is getting louder once again on Twitter. Future forwards Matthew Berman just launched something that he calls a loop library, which I'll link to in the show notes, and gives you a bunch of different copiable loops, including for functions outside of engineering that you can go try and play with.

So that's it for this week in AI for very busy people or the 5 minute AI week. Hope you have a great weekend and see you back here for an operator's cut tomorrow.