The 2025 State of AI Report is out, with lots of fun slides and a full video presentation. They’ve been consistently solid, providing a kind of outside general view.

I’m skipping over stuff my regular readers already know that doesn’t bear repeating.

Qwen The Fine Tune King For Now

Nathan Benaich: Once a “Llama rip-off,” @Alibaba_Qwen now powers 40% of all new fine-tunes on @huggingface. China's open-weights ecosystem has overtaken Meta's, with Llama riding off into the sunset…for now.

I highlight this because the ‘for now’ is important to understand, and to note that it's Qwen not DeepSeek. As in, models come and models go, and especially in the open model world people will switch on you on a dime. Stop worrying about lock-ins and mystical ‘tech stacks.’

Rise Of The Machines

Robots now reason too. “Chain-of-Action” planning brings structured thought to the [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) Qwen The Fine Tune King For Now

(01:19) Rise Of The Machines

(01:40) Model Context Protocol Wins Out

(02:06) Benchmarks Are Increasingly Not So Useful

(02:56) The DeepSeek Moment Was An Overreaction

(03:40) Capitalism Is Hard To Pin Down

(04:30) The Odds Are Against Us And The Situation Is Grim

(06:35) They Grade Last Year's Predictions

(09:35) Their Predictions for 2026

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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