What matters today: Midjourney is pushing to widen discovery in its copyright fight with Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros., asking a judge to overturn a ruling that limited the studios to disclosing only consumer-facing AI use, so it can argue that unlicensed AI training is common industry practice. It was otherwise a quiet start to the day (this digest gets a fuller rewrite this evening): a handful of open source and model releases, plus a China quant fund story, rounded out the morning's items.
AI / LLMs
- GLM 5.2 running on AMD's MI355X, benchmarked at 2,626 tokens/sec per node, over 2x cheaper than on Blackwell: a concrete data point (per the submitter's own benchmark) in the continued push to loosen Nvidia's grip on inference pricing.
- Simon Willison links to an "Open Source AI Gap Map": a new attempt to track how far open models trail closed ones, worth a look for anyone weighing open versus proprietary weights.
- Mistral released Leanstral 1.5: the latest version in its Lean theorem proving model line (the announcement page did not load, so specifics beyond the title are unconfirmed).
Devtools & Infra
- SearXNG: a free, AGPL licensed metasearch engine (33k+ GitHub stars) that aggregates results from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave and others into one interface without tracking or profiling users, a self-hostable alternative for anyone souring on mainstream search.
- FreeBSD ate my RAM: a developer's writeup diagnosing unexpectedly high memory usage on FreeBSD (the page did not load for a fuller read, so this is title only).
Startups & Industry
- Midjourney wants Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose their own internal AI use: the studios sued Midjourney in 2025 for copyright infringement, and Midjourney is now asking the court to overturn a ruling that limited the studios to disclosing only consumer-facing AI, arguing broader disclosure would show unlicensed AI training is standard industry practice.
- Chinese quant funds have more than doubled assets under management to about $384B in under a year: Bloomberg reports the surge is being credited to AI-driven trading models beating human stock pickers, pulling capital away from discretionary managers.
Elsewhere
- The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything: the first installment of a history series on the studio behind SimCity and SimEarth.
- Africans Are Turning to Starlink (paywalled): The Economist on growing satellite internet adoption across the continent.
Threads
- An "alternatives to the default stack" thread runs through the day: GLM 5.2 on AMD's MI355X (an alternative to Nvidia for inference), SearXNG (an alternative to mainstream search engines), and the Open Source AI Gap Map (tracking how open models compare to closed ones).