Pranav

Helping developers turn apps into profitable businesses @google .

Thoughts -

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Very happy to support this on behalf of Google. We have long benefited from open source, are big contributors to open source and in fact have consistently made open weights models with Gemma available from @GoogleDeepMind @demishassabis . Onwards!

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Opus 5 - here's we go:

[Pranav @sagapranav]

A much needed nuanced take on the topic.

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

Steel has no nationality. Chinese Steel in American buildings on American soil is as American as apple pie...

But what about when that was a deliberate dumping strategy to destroy the American steel industry?

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America NEEDS leading edge open weight models, but it's reasonable to ask: is China playing a game we don't fully understand designed to weaken our AI industry over the next decade?

The equivalent of US Steel being forced to sell to Nippon Steel

All of that said, I have a strong bias to *not* ban Chinese open weight models (at least not now) but I don't think it's as cut and dried as it appears on the surface

[Pranav @sagapranav]

@AutismCapital Or he's always right, just with a negative sign

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Did someone say coordinated Industrial scale distillation?

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Federal judge approves Anthropic's $1,500,000,000.00 copyright settlement, the largest known payout in U.S. copyright history.

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Worth considering:
1. ARPANET: created through ARPA, NSFNET was publicly funded and served as the internet’s backbone until commercialization in the mid-1990s.
2. Mosaic: supported by grants from NSF
3. GPS remains a US owned utility, operated by the Space Force, whose civilian service is made continuously available worldwide without direct user fees.
None of that resulted in “internet communism” or “navigation communism.” It created common infrastructure on top of which trillions of dollars of private enterprise could develop. Also, public roads do not require state owned cars. Publicly supported compute would not require state owned AI applications.

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Some observations on Kimi:

1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run.

2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China.

3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.

4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.

5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.

6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Summary:
1. A capable Chinese open model exists therefore
2. China does not understand AGI therefore
3. open weights are decelerationist therefore
4. open AI must culminate in some state run communism therefore
5. the United States should deliberately manufacture regulatory fear around Chinese models?

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Competition is good :)

[Claude @claudeai]

Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits.

Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will receive a one-time $100 credit.

Demand for Fable has been challenging to predict, which is why we rolled it out to subscription plans in stages, extending access several times as we secured additional capacity.

[Pranav @sagapranav]

I doubt it was funny for people who saw these bills.

[Amazon Web Services @awscloud]

Typo alert: Some customers saw quadrillion-dollar AWS billing estimates today. Slight miscalculation on our end (very slight 😅).

We're fixing it now. No action needed on your end. Sorry for the confusion.

Real question: what will you do with those trillions instead?

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Writing quality across all frontier models has meaningfully regressed since Opus 4.6. Fable is particularly painful to read.

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Are there any qualitative evals for different providers for the same model on openrouter? @OpenRouter

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Fable (High) in cowork:

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Maybe I need to prod more, but on a simple prompt "Create an infographic explaining Kimi Delta Attention" Kimi K3 created this:

[Arena.ai @arena]

Big news: Kimi-K3 by @Kimi_Moonshot is now #1 in the Frontend Code Arena with 1679 pts, surpassing Claude Fable 5.

This is a 17-place jump from Kimi-k2.6 (#18 -> #1).

In Frontend, Kimi-K3 ranked #1 in 6 of 7 domains: Brand & Marketing, Reference-Based Design, Data & Analytics, Consumer Product, Simulations, and Content Creation Tools, landing #2 only in Gaming behind Fable 5.

The full model weights will be released by July 27.

Congrats to the @Kimi_Moonshot team on this major milestone!

[Pranav @sagapranav]

@akothari This was long due, everything between these two roles is either friction or fiction.

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Partnering with PE firms to drive AI adoption makes the optics of AI worse not better in front of common people.

[Pranav @sagapranav]

It’s incredible to see how far we’ve come. Just a few years ago, LLMs struggled to edit a handful of files; today, models like Fable and GPT-5x can work autonomously for hours or even days, performing meaningful work.

Many open-source models now outperform GPT-4, which was itself a massive leap forward in multimodality, reasoning, and overall intelligence. The pace of progress is extraordinary, and the future ahead looks incredibly exciting.

[Pranav @sagapranav]

@claudeai Genuine question: what imagery were you trying to invoke by showing a cemetery in the beginning of the video?

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Why does X feel like Instagram?

[Pranav @sagapranav]

Satya's article is not nearly as dramatic as the headline makes it sound

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

Satya Nadella has issued a shocking warning to companies using AI https://t.co/nYHRWkosWP

[Pranav @sagapranav]

1. Enterprise workflows are over-hyped, path dependent, born of constraints that are no longer relevant and arguably *not a moat*.
2. The urge to bolt AI into everything is infact a clear sign of institutional intertia. 3. Enterprises not deriving enough value from AI is *not* a model issue.