Chinese state media reported today that DeepSeek and MiniMax completed registration under China’s interim AI export rules and carried on releasing open weights and licensing overseas. It is being shared as regulatory approval. It is a filing, it comes from one source, and it partly answers the question we left open last week.
A post on r/LocalLLaMA this morning said a Hugging Face organisation reached the trending page on farmed likes. We pulled a sample of the accounts behind its biggest model and compared them with the accounts behind a model we know is popular. One measure we tried showed nothing. The other showed everything.
China published draft export controls today covering 23 AI technologies, and the open-weight world spent the afternoon working out whether the models it depends on are about to stop appearing. The proposed size threshold answers most of that. It sits around 280 times above the image model we checked on launch day.
Somebody emailed the licensing address printed in the Qwen Research License and posted the reply: three tiers, with the first 300,000 images a month costing nothing. If that is accurate it covers essentially every individual using the model. None of it is published anywhere, which is the part to hold on to.
On Saturday we wrote that the RTX 5090 discontinuation story rested on a single leaker’s post and said we would report back either way. Three days on there is still no statement from NVIDIA, the card is still listed on its own product page, and the second leaker being cited may be the same person as the first. Meanwhile people are picking replacement cards today.
NVIDIA is reportedly steering the GB202 die to its professional cards, which would leave the RTX 5080 as the top GeForce. Every outlet carrying it traces back to a single leaker’s post from this morning. The interesting question is not whether the card dies. It is what happens to the amount of VRAM a person can buy new.
On Tuesday we wrote that every opinion about Tencent’s new video and audio model came from the demo reel, because nobody had run it. We have now run it on one RTX 5090. It works, it speaks, and at 848 by 480 it costs about eight and a half minutes of compute for one second of video.
Tencent Hunyuan and Fudan put out a video and audio model that generates both in one pass, and the headline all day has been native 2K under an MIT licence. We read the licence file and listed the repository. The licence is better than people are saying. The checkpoints are smaller than people are saying. Nobody has run it yet.
Somebody posted a photograph of a melted power socket on an RTX 4090 that had been fine for three years. They started generating video in mid August. By 20 September the machine shut down every time a render began. We cannot diagnose their card and neither can anyone else online, but the mechanism behind this failure class is documented, and it explains why a workload change can expose something a gaming load was hiding.
Micro Center has started asking RTX 5090 buyers for a government photo ID and a signed declaration naming where the card will be installed. It is not a law, it is not confirmed at every store, and the headlines are not saying either of those things. Here is what is actually documented, and what it does to the buy-or-rent decision we published last week.