It is very easy to be pessimistic and right.
Most ideas are bad. Most markets are too early, too small, too crowded, too hard. You can build an entire worldview around seeing the flaw first, and be rewarded for it over and over again
But the strange thing about startups is that the only outcomes that matter come from the places where someone was optimistic and right
I used to underestimate how much this matters. But there is a whole world of difference between reacting to the world as it is, and having enough understanding of the world as it is to still stay open to what it could become
Long optimism
There’s a big misconception about how GLM 5.2 was trained. Yes, they distilled Claude and GPT 5.5 — but distillation is not how they matched Opus quality. Distillation only fixed the cold start problem in RL.
RLing an agentic coding model isn’t rocket science. In simplified terms:
1. RL needs trajectories — rollouts where the model actually completed a task in some env
2. No successful trajectory on a task = zero gradient = you can’t RL it. This is the cold start problem
3. Distillation solves it. You seed your model with knowledge from a smarter one (Claude, GPT) on tasks it can’t do yet
4. Now it produces positive trajectories on those tasks
5. RL on those trajectories and hill climb agentic coding
6. At that point you no longer need to distill and can solely hill climb RL to better models
This is an interesting curve. I’d argue it’s harder to get to Opus 4.8 from scratch than to go from Opus 4.8 → Fable/Mythos tier.
GLM 5.2 is already producing positive trajectories, so they have plenty to RL on — they’ll keep climbing to Mythos quality without distilling any further. They no longer need American models.
$NFLX completely getting demolished
cheapest it’s been in years, but every time I think of buying I remember…
- no hit shows leading to massive growth like Squid Game for example
- they tried to buy $WBD and $ROKU, now $LION which makes me think they really are struggling to create content
- the only reason they beat EPS last Q was because of the $3B breakup fee, otherwise no growth
- Mag 7s are better businesses trading at lower multiples
what’s the argument to go long here other than it is bottoming? which I agree it probably is…but is risk to reward amazing here even if it doesn’t go that much lower?
1 - So GLM 5.2 is 700b parameters (ish)
2 - 4x DGX Sparks can supposedly handle up to 700b parameters (give or take)
3 - GLM 5.2 is supposedly in striking distance of the performance of GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. In my brief tests, it's really not shabby at all.
4 - So for $20k, you can get near the frontier on your table.
5 - Extrapolate the trend, and you could have mythos/5.5 pro - class models in your dining room for the cost of a cheap car less than five years from now. Even without extrapolation, we're already the near frontier running locally.
6 - Paying real api costs, I could easily blow through $3,000 per month coding and running agents. The machine pays for itself in 6-7 months conservatively.
7 - In 3-5 years, most power users of AI will self-host.
8 - Am I missing something?