Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Chinese AI apps post user numbers that would embarrass most Silicon Valley launches. Whether you can install one, sign up and pay from the United States is a separate question. It breaks into three doors: the download, the account and the money. Most coverage skips the doors and talks about benchmarks. That is backwards for … Read more
Last December, a strange phone went on sale in China. It could open your apps, find the right buttons, tap them for you. Here was an AI assistant that could actually control your phone. Only 30,000 units existed. They sold out in 48 hours, and resellers soon asked around $1,110 for a phone that retailed … Read more
The apps you have probably never opened There is a quiet gap between what Americans think is happening in AI and what is actually happening. In the US, the names are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Midjourney. In much of the rest of the world, a different set of apps leads. Most of them come from … Read more
A design task that runs $1.61 on GPT-6 Astra costs about 2.3 cents on DeepSeek’s new model. Same brief, same output, one bill sixty times smaller. That single number is the whole pitch. DeepSeek widened that gap on purpose, and it did it three days after teaching its chatbot to talk out loud. Vision is … Read more
I’ve been watching Google roll out AI products for a while now. Every few weeks, there’s a new announcement. Usually, it’s something technically impressive but feels a bit distant. Like, cool, but am I actually going to use it? Then I tried NotebookLM. And honestly? It’s different. NotebookLM isn’t the only underrated thing Google shipped. … Read more
DeepSeek dropped a new model yesterday. No warning. No teaser campaign. Just a quiet API update and a bunch of benchmark numbers that made me do a double take. Here’s the thing about DeepSeek: they always do this. You’re sitting there, minding your own business, and suddenly they launch something that makes everyone else look … Read more
I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect much when I saw the announcement. Another vision model. Another API endpoint. Another “exp” tag that usually means “try it if you’re bored.” But then I actually read what this thing does. And I spent a couple hours poking at it. Now I’m sitting here writing this, which means … Read more
I’ve been quietly watching Tencent’s WorkBuddy for a few months. It’s not the flashiest AI tool out there, but the numbers are hard to ignore. Over 20 million desktop visits in June alone. That’s not nothing. Now they’re about to drop Hy4 into it. Here’s the short version: Tencent’s new flagship model, Hy4, was spotted … Read more
I will be honest about my first reaction. When I saw DeepSeek Harness (DSH) trending on GitHub, I assumed it was another AI repository riding a wave of hype. GitHub star counts can mean several different things. Sometimes they reflect respect for the founder. Sometimes people bookmark a repo to read later and then forget … Read more
I’ve been watching Google’s AI rollout for a while now. Every few weeks, there’s a new announcement. Usually, it’s about some feature that’s technically impressive but feels a bit… distant. Like, cool, but am I actually going to use it? Then I saw the news about Chrome’s Gemini integration expanding, and specifically, the new Auto … Read more