![\"Human](\"https:\/\/d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net\/img\/c800x450-w800-q60\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Open-Weight-Model-8-17-800x450.jpg\")
<\/picture> <\/div>\nThe AI arms race heats up: <\/strong>“The U.S. is preparing to \u200ctell dozens of countries they must pick sides in the artificial intelligence race with China, warning they will be excluded from a U.S.-led AI coalition if they also sign up for Beijing’s competing framework,” reports<\/a> Reuters. “Washington last year launched the Pax Silica initiative aimed at securing supply chains for AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals, amid a fierce technology rivalry with \u200bBeijing….By pressing \u200bcountries to choose sides the U.S. hopes to starve China of resources in a race to make the most sophisticated AI, which could be used for military or economic dominance.”<\/p>\n At the same time, the Trump administration appears to be set to financially benefit from the growth and sophistication of Chinese AI models. World Liberty Financial, a Trump family\u2013backed crypto firm, offers tokens that are then used by WorldClaw, which Reuters calls<\/a> “a Hong Kong\u2013based venture offering artificial-intelligence models developed by Chinese companies.” According to Reuters, “43 of the 90 models available through WorldClaw’s website, or nearly half, were developed by Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai and other Chinese technology companies the Trump administration says pose risks to national security and intellectual property.”<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Chinese AI products are rapidly gaining popularity in the U.S.: Mozilla’s chief technology officer “switched to Chinese AI startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3<\/a><\/span> for many of his day-to-day activities within days of the new, powerful model’s launch more than a week ago,” reports<\/a> the Associated Press. “Earlier, he had been using another high-performing Chinese model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, for routine tasks such as managing his calendar, documents and email….U.S. companies like cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said they’re switching to Chinese AI models to help trim costs.” Some of the value-add from Chinese models is that they’re often open-weight or open-source, not closed.<\/p>\n “AI systems exist along a spectrum,” explains<\/a> John Villasenor at Brookings. “On one end are closed models, such as the various tiers of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Users can submit queries to these models and get responses, but the detailed inner workings of the models and how they were trained are proprietary. At the other end of the spectrum are\u00a0open-source models<\/a>, in which information about the training data, the code used to generate weights from the training data, and the resulting weights are publicly disclosed. In between these two endpoints are ‘open-weight’ models in which the weights that ‘determine how the model interprets input data and generates outputs<\/a>‘ are public, but the methods that were used to generate those weights are not.” Globally, China is establishing dominance as a provider of both open-weight and open-source models, which some companies prefer as they’re a lot cheaper to run, with more customization, control, and data privacy available.<\/p>\n “If American AI is dominated by a small handful of closed model providers, the result will be an overconcentration of power,” warns Villasenor. “That raises many concerns, including the risk of regulatory capture and a set of resulting policies that impede new market entrants.”<\/p>\n Starving China of resources is one path, I guess, but beating China at their own game would be another possibly worth choosing.<\/p>\n Dose of sanity:\u00a0<\/strong>Finally, someone says what much of the left needs to hear surrounding jobs, pay, and inequality! “If men disproportionately hold dirty or dangerous jobs, paying them more may widen the earnings gap between men and women even when no woman is formally excluded (of course, one could also frame this as widening the longevity gap in women’s favor),” writes<\/a> the eminently reasonable Kelsey Piper for The Argument.<\/em> “Differences in opportunity, choice, and achievement can accumulate into durable disparities between groups defined by immutable characteristics like sex. But\u2014while such a disparity might be a warning sign to investigate further for injustice\u2014we have to keep in mind that our objective is to identify and redress injustice, not difference itself. Sometimes unequal outcomes are evidence of sexism and will vanish in a better world. Sometimes they are the mechanism by which society persuades people to haul away our garbage.”<\/p>\n Scenes from Texas:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>I was back in Texas with my family last week and shocked by the amount of Talarico Fever (in an admittedly blue city).<\/p>\n Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for Senate against the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, believes “it’s time to start flipping tables”\u2014referencing Jesus flipping the tables of merchants outside the temple\u2014and reclaim talk of Jesus and the gospel from the right.<\/p>\n Democratic strategists, per a long\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>piece<\/a> on the matter, seem to believe the Talarico playbook will win over ultra-religious Bible Belt voters. I am less sure. Talarico drew plenty of scorn back in March for an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in which he claimed that the story of the Annunciation\u2014when the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her she would bear a child, to be called Jesus\u2014lays the foundation for Christians to accept abortion as morally permissible. “To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create,” Talarico told<\/a> Rogan. He further elaborated that Christian opposition to abortion is not rooted in Scripture. “All I’m asking is that for <\/span>Christians <\/span>who are pro-choice and who respect the bodily autonomy of women, that we be given the space to make our theological argument, because I think there is a lot of biblical evidence to support that opinion,” he added.<\/p>\n I don’t think this is theologically sound<\/a> in the slightest, but more to the point: I don’t think most Christian voters\u2014like evangelicals and Catholics, both groups strongly represented all over Texas\u2014will find his logic persuasive. (Talarico also said that “God is nonbinary” during a debate over trans youth inclusion in single-gender sports. My point being: I’m not sure most Texas evangelicals will appreciate his theology. “It is blasphemous,” one Republican told the Post<\/em>.)<\/p>\n The post Open-Weight<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Plus: “Blasphemous” talk in Texas, botox everywhere, ink on Mace, and more… …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,9,161],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-130077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-policy","7":"category-politics","8":"category-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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