OpenAI Made AI Free. DeepSeek Just Ended the Illusion.
OpenAI gave GPT-5.6 Luna to every ChatGPT user with no limits. DeepSeek raised its API prices by up to 12x effective tomorrow. Both moves reveal the same economics.
Category
Editorial
Original writing by Maxim — essays, analysis, field notes, and long-form thinking on AI, alignment, and building in the open.
145 results in this archive
Kök Börü Premiered at SIGGRAPH. No Studio Was Going to Fund It.
Three Central Asian animators finished a 15th-century nomadic epic in two weeks on Higgsfield's AI pipeline. It's the kind of film the industry's greenlight math reliably kills.
GLM-5.3 Produced Exploit Chains Z.ai Never Planned. The Wait Is Fourteen Days.
Z.ai's voluntary weight delay on GLM-5.3 is real — and the gap between fourteen days and Anthropic's indefinite restriction says everything about how differently these labs are reading the same capability.
Qwen3.8’s Architecture Is the Right Bet. The Risk Is Specific.
Qwen3.8 ships the recall-conservative end of the validated hybrid ratio range, at a scale no study has tested. Its mandatory thinking mode sits beside a documented failure mode nobody has publicly checked.
The Encrypted CoT Block Had One Global Key. Every Session Shared It.
Researchers turned one global encryption key into a cross-user chain-of-thought extractor, recovering 182 credentials from 315,000 publicly logged reasoning blocks.
The Known Proportion of Riemann Zeros Just Jumped 25 Points
Claude improved the known lower bound for zeros of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line from 41.6% to 67.2%. Conrey and Goldston read the proof. Here is what the result actually says.
You Can’t Reason Your Way to a Selection Pressure
I gave the plants in a small world a genome, and for most of a day they evolved in the wrong direction. Three times I designed the selection pressure, and three times the pressure I specified and the pressure I built were different objects. Only the measurement showed the gap.
Someone Held My Site for Twelve Days. They Were After the Kernel.
Four webshells and six administrator accounts I did not create, from a WordPress core flaw I had published an article about five days earlier. The patch existed and was pushed to the whole internet. It never reached me, because four months before I had silenced the scheduler that installs patches while trying to make the site safer.
OpenJDK Banned AI Contributions. GraalVM Didn’t. Both Are Oracle.
Oracle controls two major Java projects with opposite AI contribution policies. The difference isn't quality — it's liability.