u/Crucco

Benchmarks here: https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2105388084154056939?s=20

I did NOT expect this from Google. An actual frontier model, after this summer's fiasco with Gemini 3.5 Pro being cancelled, top brains leaving DeepMind, and Demis Hassabis "promoted" to chief scientist.

Top AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are facing a massive economic moat problem, and they are actively trying to use government regulation to manufacture an artificial one.
Prominent "Big Short" investor Steve Eisman recently summarized this exact dynamic, stating that these CEOs realize "there are no moats around their business whatsoever and they're trying to manufacture a crisis."

1. The Missing Economic Moat
   A classic economic moat is a structural barrier (like branding, network effects, high switching costs, or proprietary tech) that protects a company's profits from competitors. Frontier AI labs are learning that they don't actually have a sustainable moat for several reasons:
   • The "Brute Force" Trap: Building the most powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) requires burning through billions of dollars on compute and electricity. However, as soon as a company builds a frontier model, competitors copy the architecture or catch up quickly.
   • The Open-Weight Threat: Open-source and open-weight models (from Meta and Chinese developers) are rapidly matching the capabilities of proprietary models. Why would a business pay OpenAI millions of dollars a year if they can run a nearly identical model for a fraction of the cost?
   • Commoditization and Price Wars: Because the core technology behaves similarly across different providers, AI companies are forced into brutal price wars to stay competitive. For example, OpenAI recently had to cut pricing for one of its models by 80%, despite suffering staggering multi-billion dollar losses.
2. How Regulatory Capture Creates an Artificial Moat
   When a company cannot protect its market share through normal capitalism, it often turns to the government. This is a classic economic strategy known as regulatory capture.
   By fueling a narrative that AI is a terrifying, existential threat capable of "taking over the open internet" or causing human extinction, CEOs like Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Sam Altman (OpenAI) are successfully pressuring politicians to introduce heavy regulatory frameworks.
   If regulations pass that require strict "third-party safety evaluations," expensive government compliance audits, or outright bans on unvetted model architectures, it achieves two key goals for the incumbents:
   • It Kills Open Source: It becomes legally impossible or prohibitively expensive for independent developers or academic institutions to release "open-weight" models into the wild, effectively destroying the incumbents' biggest threat.
   • It Locks Out Future Competitors: A tech giant like Microsoft or Google can easily afford a massive team of compliance lawyers and safety auditors. A scrappy startup cannot. Regulatory red tape freezes the market in place.
   While AI safety concerns from researchers may be genuine, for the corporate executives steering these companies, a highly regulated crisis is an incredibly effective tool to stop their multi-billion-dollar investments from being commoditized.

Prediction markets say 50/50 but the stock market today says YES, everything (except Apple) is tanking.

Data from online testing and many sources on X agree on the new fast model of Google releasing today.
https://x.com/thtbee_/status/2094521833701965855
https://x.com/StatsWire/status/2094689139052642814
https://x.com/Priyannkaaaa/status/2094644600053068236
https://x.com/Lentils80/status/2094495564247531851

It will probably release alongside the new Anthropic Fable 5.1

Gemini Flash 3.8 won't be a very capable model for complex tasks or for coding. But it will be fast and cheap. Made for the general public. Supporting Google Search, Assistant Devices, Android Auto, and billions of devices.

Still no news about a Gemini Pro model. That line is silent since February. The Deepmind website still says "Gemini 3.5 Pro coming soon", but Google is shamefully silent about it.

Yeah he just posted another one.
Paintball with orange paint. The enemy team is (obviously) the Bears.
https://x.com/saylor/status/2094329015431528794

https://x.com/saylor/status/2093970108603371740

So, a very much clicked post on X today claimed that S&P 500 always drops after midterm elections in the US (https://x.com/zeroXhope/status/2092715650917519464)

This is completely FALSE. I have calculated it again. It seems to be random. Below, the price of S&P 500 one week before and after the election dates:

1962: −11.8%
1966: −13.1%
1970: +0.1%
1974: −29.7%
1978: +1.1%
1982: +14.8%
1986: +14.6%
1990: −6.6%
1994: −1.5%
1998: +26.7%
2002: −23.4%
2006: +13.6%
2010: +12.8%
2014: +11.4%
2018: −6.2%
2022: −19.4%

Methods:
Daily S&P 500 closes (^GSPC, Yahoo Finance) from 1960-2022 were resampled to month-end. The chart is a log-scale line of those month-end levels for 1962-2022, with open red circles at each November month-end in a midterm year (1962, 1966, …, 2022). Election-window prices use the last NYSE session before Election Day and the first session after; the week window uses sessions ~7 calendar days on either side. Calendar returns are prior year-end to year-end; intra-year max drawdown is the minimum close-to-close peak-to-trough within the calendar year.

https://x.com/saylor/status/2092878381268324795

https://x.com/saylor/status/2092277359034458361

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately the legendary Steam Economy Enhancer by Nuklon is currently not working properly after Valve’s Market Beta UI, so I wrote a smaller, focused replacement that does the few things I found useful.
Steam Market Helper (free & open source):

* Bulk-sell everything in the current inventory (or only duplicates) at a user-specified value under the real cheapest competing listing
* Colour-codes your active listings (green = good, red = too expensive, yellow = undercutting too hard)
* One click removes or relists the mispriced ones (will still need confirmation with the Steam app)
* Shows all your listings on a single page

It deliberately does less than the original SEE: no buy orders, no gems/boosters, no trade offer tools. It's a quick fix while the mothership of Nuklon gets repaired.

Install:

1. Violentmonkey or Tampermonkey
2. Chrome/Edge users: enable “Allow user scripts” in the extension settings
3. Install from the raw script link on the GitHub

Full details, installation guide, how the pricing logic works, and source:
https://github.com/federicogiorgi/SteamMarketHelper

Completely free, MIT license, no tracking, only talks to steamcommunity.com. Feedback and bug reports welcome!

Hope it saves some time when you want to bulk sell your Steam Inventory, and relist your collection to more realistic market prices.