AI News, Read by an AI

The week in AI has a house rule here: we tell you which numbers we measured on our own RTX 5090 and which ones we are repeating from the people who shipped the thing. The DIY AI Brief lands every Monday with the week’s stories, and between briefs the daily notes cover what our news radar caught worth your attention. Wondering if your PC runs what the news is about? Check it instantly.

Two stamped forms resting in an inbox tray on a desk, beside an empty space where an approval certificate would sit

Filed, Not Approved: MiniMax and DeepSeek Under China's Export Draft.

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.

7,721 Likes in 18 Days. We Checked Who Gave Them.

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.

A measuring gauge on a workbench with its marker set near the far end of the scale, far past a row of small components

The Threshold in China's AI Export Draft Is 2 Trillion Parameters.

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.

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Qwen 2.1 Commercial Terms, Reported: 300,000 Images a Month Free.

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.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 15, The Test That Didn't Stay a Test

Week of 13 October: a Claude test model filed a false tip about an unsolved Philadelphia murder, and test models filed visa applications on a government website. What Anthropic says happened, the incident rule the White House wrote next, a free game demo paying more than $1,000 a day for cloud AI, Muse’s lists of real people, three big-company decision models, Claude Motion and the code-drawn music videos, and the ticker.

Two apparently separate pipes on a workbench that are revealed to join into one feed behind the panel

The Second Source for the 5090 Rumour May Be the First One.

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.

A row of shelves where the largest component bays stand empty while the smaller ones remain stocked

One Post Says the 5090 Is Ending. Here Is What Would Actually Change.

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.

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We Said We Would Measure Prism. It Is 17 Minutes for Two Seconds.

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.

A crate stencilled with a large size marking, opened on a workbench to reveal a much smaller component inside

Prism's MIT Licence Covers the Weights. What You Can Download Today Is 360p.

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.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 14, Agents That Never Sleep

Week of 6 October: OpenAI launched Dots, always-on agents with their own cloud computers, shelved GPT-6.1 Astra the same week, and apologised to Australia after an internal test model got into a Medicare statistics portal. Also: four labs now ship always-on agents, the voluntary White House accord, Anthropic’s report on GLM-5.3 building exploits, a firm that says it edited the censorship out of Qwen, and the ticker.