Newsletter
Hugging Face got hacked -- Open local AI came to the rescue!
Two trillion-parameter 'open' models dropped in ten days — Qwen 3.8 and Kimi K3 — and you can't run either. The same week, Hugging Face got breached and its own responders, blocked by commercial-model guardrails, ran the forensics on GLM 5.2, an open-weight model on their own hardware. Same lesson from opposite ends — plus what to actually run on a 24GB card today.
Open weights are a weapon now — one country funds them, another wants to gate them
DeepSeek closed a ~$7.4B round with China's state AI fund holding the only voting rights, funding open weights like national infrastructure. The same week, Demis Hassabis called for a FINRA-style body to screen frontier models before release, open or closed. Plus: the twist where the country bankrolling the giveaway floats locking down its own frontier models.
The 'expensive' GPU came out cheaper — we rented both to find out
We rented an A100 and an H100 back to back: the pricier card cost less per training run because it finished in half the time. Plus honest notes from the AI Engineer World's Fair floor, and a Qwen 3.7 open-weights status check.
Qwen 3.7's open weights are overdue — by the math, not vibes
Qwen's own release cadence says the 3.7 open weights should already be out, and they're not. Plus GLM-5.2 running locally: a frontier open model that takes serious hardware.
DeepSeek V4 gets deployable, a July 24 trap, and a quiet price cut
DeepSeek V4 is going from 'just dropped' to 'actually deployable' as the tooling catches up — plus a July 24 deprecation that breaks your code if you're not watching, and a 4x price cut on V4 Pro.
Ollama's quiet Mac shift, the Qwen refresh, and the closed-weight drift
Ollama 0.30 quietly changed how Apple Silicon runs models, auto-routing safetensors to MLX and GGUF to llama.cpp Metal. The open workhorses are now Qwen 3.5 9B and Qwen 3.6 27B. Plus: Qwen's last two flagship models shipped closed.
MiniMax M3's asterisk, the Windows shift, and World's Fair plans
MiniMax M3 ships with frontier benchmarks but no downloadable weights yet. The Windows unified-memory hardware shift is coming for Apple Silicon's lead. And a personal note about who I'd like to see at AI Engineer World's Fair.
Backend wars, Mac math, and the back-catalog refresh
Three speculative-decoding backends benched head to head on a single RTX 3090. The VRAM calculator finally caught up. And a 120-article audit found stale Qwen 2.5 recommendations.
Power week in local AI: Mythos, MiroThinker, real Qwen 3.6 builds
Two researchers cracked Apple's flagship defense in a week. An open-source agent beat closed-source on real benchmarks. Multi-GPU stopped being theoretical.
This Week in Local AI — I Built DFlash and Audited Lightning
I built DFlash from source on a real RTX 3090 and benched both Qwens. Then audited my stack after PyPI's `lightning` package shipped malware that abuses Claude Code hooks.
This Week in Local AI — DeepSeek V4 Took #1 on Vibe Code
DeepSeek V4-Flash hit #1 on Vibe Code Benchmark. Qwen 3.6 dropped both variants. FP4 landed in llama.cpp. Anthropic admitted they quietly downgraded Claude Code on March 4.
Your RTX 3090 Doesn't Send Policy Change Emails
Anthropic cuts OpenClaw from Claude subscriptions. Gemma 4's first week in review. 12 architecture patterns from the Claude Code leak, ranked for local AI.