China's Kimmy K3 ends US AI cost advantage

War (9)

• Eric Schmidt reports a Friday barrage of Iranian missiles and drones hit a major air base in Jordan, killing at least two, possibly three, U.S. Army soldiers and injuring several others. This attack follows a week of hostile exchanges as the ceasefire collapsed.
• Eric Schmidt states that with the deaths in Jordan and another Army soldier killed in Iraq by an Iranian drone, the total number of Americans killed in the war has reached 17.
• Despite over 13,000 U.S. strikes damaging Iran's Air Force and Navy, Eric Schmidt notes Iran retained robust capabilities, including numerous attack drones, mine-laying boats, and missiles. American officials believe Iran used the ceasefire to rebuild these capabilities.
• Michael Barbaro suggests the ceasefire has become a pretext for the administration to disclose less about the war's true state, while Eric Schmidt explains that acknowledging new deaths during a ceasefire challenges the narrative of reduced risk.
• Eric Schmidt details the war's expansion, now involving countries like Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Iran's strategy aims to inflict pain on U.S. allies by targeting civilian infrastructure to pressure the U.S. or make allies reconsider hosting its military.
• Iran is threatening to activate the Houthis in Yemen, leading Saudi Arabia to launch preemptive strikes. Eric Schmidt reports the Houthis responded by threatening to close the Red Sea to Saudi traffic, opening a second front in the five-month-old war.
• Both sides are striking a wider range of targets. The U.S. now hits civilian infrastructure like bridges (dual-use), while Iran targets energy sites and critical desalination plants, indicating an escalation in the perceived tolerable human toll.
• The U.S. maintains about 15,000 troops for the naval blockade and 50,000 troops overall in the region and Europe supporting the campaign. Eric Schmidt states that fighter jets like F-16s and F-35s are being rushed back to the Middle East from Europe.
• Eric Schmidt warns that withholding war details from the public, especially during escalation, carries the risk of obscuring the true dimensions of the conflict. He notes the Pentagon disclosed 100 injuries since July 7th only after New York Times reporting.

Business (1)

• A federal judge temporarily halted Paramount's $11 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery following an antitrust lawsuit from 12 Democratic states, which argues the merger would harm movie theaters, TV providers, and audiences.

War (6)

• Robert Evans states Richard Marcinko commanded Seal Team Six from its inception in August 1980 until July 1983, a relatively short but foundational period for the unit.
• Richard Marcinko's Red Cell unit, tasked with testing Navy security, routinely kidnapped sensitive employees and subjected them to intense workouts and mockery. This gave Marcinko an opportunity to target officers and civilians he resented.
• In March 1986, Red Cell operators attempted to kidnap civilian security head Ronald Sheridan at his Los Angeles home. Sheridan's wife, Margaret, nearly shot an operator with a loaded .45 caliber gun, highlighting the personal security efforts that Marcinko's team bypassed.
• In December 1989, Seal Team Four's mission to capture Manuel Noriega's jet hangar in Panama with small arms was a disaster. Four Seals were killed and seven or eight wounded almost instantly due to lack of cover against machine gun fire, rendering their sacrifice meaningless as Noriega never attempted to use his jets.
• During Desert Storm, Seals, under the distrusting General Norman Schwartzkopf, achieved unproblematic success, particularly a six-man unit that diverted two Iraqi divisions with sabotage. Other units cleared mines and performed search and rescue without casualties, demonstrating their effective use within a broader military strategy.
• In January 2002, Seal Team Six officer Vic Hyder murdered an unarmed elderly Afghan man carrying a cassette tape, mistaking it for a grenade, despite having night vision. This marked Team Six's first action of the Afghanistan War and ignited internal complaints from other Seals.

Corruption (4)

• An intoxicated Marcinko ordered his Red Cell operators to beat and film Ronald Sheridan, waterboarding him in a toilet. An operator broke a rib while torturing the tied-up, unarmed man, demonstrating the recklessness of the exercise.
• Marcinko was fired from Red Cell after the Sheridan incident, followed by a full Naval Investigative Services probe, nicknamed "Iron Eagle," launched in spring 1986. This was prompted by an officer reporting Marcinko's drunken gun incident in New Zealand and his financial fraud.
• Investigating agents uncovered extensive fake receipt fraud by John Mason, a top Seal, who subsequently cooperated. Mason provided evidence of Marcinko's scheme to defraud the Navy of $310,000 by ordering 4,300 experimental grenades, receiving a $110,000 kickback to his company.
• Richard Marcinko was convicted of bribery and conspiracy in federal court in January 1990 and sentenced to 21 months in minimum-security prison. Seal Team Six was officially renamed Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) in 1987, though it is still commonly called Team Six.

Culture (1)

• Post-Desert Storm, author Orr, in *Brave Men, Dark Waters*, noted Seals were poor at learning from failures and overly focused on violence, expressing concern about their relevance in an era of guided missiles. Some Seals internally discussed capturing or killing terrorist leaders and foreign heads of state.

Media (1)

• After his 1992 prison release, Richard Marcinko published the bestselling autobiography *Rogue Warrior*, which he later expanded into a fiction novel series of the same name. These books were marketed as based on his "real classified missions," solidifying his public persona.

Other (5)

• Robert Evans highlights that some Seal officers, driven by insecurity about their selection process, compensate by adopting an ultraviolent approach, constantly engaging in direct combat instead of leading. This pattern, exemplified by Hyder, causes a breakdown of operational tactics.
• By 2002, Seal Team Six's three assault teams - Blue (Pirates), Gold (Knights/Crusaders), and Red (Red Men) - had mascots that cultivated problematic imagery. Matthew Cole, in *Code over Country*, notes many Red Team operators underwent a "metamorphosis of identity" into stereotypical Native American warriors.
• On March 6, 2002, after the US Air Force bombed a family caravan, Vic Hyder shot a wounded, unarmed man. A retired Seal described Hyder then mutilating the body by stomping on the skull, horrifying many present but also leading some to consider it acceptable retaliation.
• In March 2002, Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts was mutilated by Al Qaeda fighters after falling from a Chinook. This incident enraged many Seals, fostering a "school yard mentality" of retaliation that, while understood by some as inevitable, was criticized for leading to war crimes.
• In early March 2002, 35 out of 40 Seal Team Six members at Bagram Airbase agreed not to mutilate bodies, yet no one reported Hyder's war crime, allowing him to be quietly pushed out. This policy of internal discipline, avoiding formal punishment, meant individuals who committed war crimes could continue their military careers elsewhere.

Models (11)

• Moonshot AI, a Chinese lab, released Kimi K3, a multimodal, open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters, which rapidly achieved number one ranking in the Code Arena and six other domains.
• Alex Weiser Gross notes Kimi models held state-of-the-art among open-weight models for 9 of the past 12 months, despite building on a recognizable transformer architecture without novel breakthroughs.
• Imad Mostaque compares Kimi K3's engineering to Chinese EVs, achieving high performance and usability through manufacturing efficiency, despite using older hardware like H-800s under US export controls.
• Dave Blundon describes Kimi K3's release as a "Sputnik times infinity" moment, enabling any entity to achieve near-frontier AI capabilities by using open-source weights and fine-tuning, independent of US models.
• Salim Ismail argues frontier intelligence is a perishable asset with a shelf life of weeks, suggesting future value will reside in architectures that can rapidly swap and adapt different AI models.
• Imad Mostaque reports Kimi K3 used the same compute as Inkling but achieved 2.5 times better data-to-intelligence conversion, optimized for Chinese silicon like Huawei 910 Ascend chips.
• Since mid-April, 13 new frontier models have launched, averaging one every 10 days, a significant acceleration from previous years, with Alex Weiser Gross predicting daily releases by January.
• PrismML's Bonside 27B is the first 27 billion parameter class model to run entirely on a smartphone, achieving ternary quantization that significantly reduces model size and increases speed fivefold.
• Alex Weiser Gross predicts sub-1-bit quantization will go mainstream within the next year, and Imad Mostaque forecasts Kimi K3-level capability on a 16GB RAM MacBook by late next year due to distillation and new chipsets.
• AI models are now statistically indistinguishable from human "superforecasters" in predicting novel events, implying cheap, tireless superhuman advisors for decisions in insurance, investing, and policy.
• Salim Ismail argues that AI forecasting will make most senior management expertise obsolete, as AI systems can reproduce judgment without human biases, shifting focus to purpose and objectives.

Startups (1)

• Alex Weiser Gross clarifies that Moonshot AI founder Yang Jilin started his Chinese startup, Recurrent AI, during his CMU PhD program, not after graduation due to visa issues.

Immigration (1)

• Salim Ismail notes 70% of elite AI researchers are not U.S. citizens, with Chinese and Indian talent being prominent; he argues that the U.S. immigration system fails to retain this crucial talent.

Health (1)

• Dr. Don Musilam reports that 3.3% of Fountain Life members, presumed healthy, have undetected cancer, emphasizing the critical role of early detection via tools like full body MRI for better cure rates.

AI Infrastructure (1)

• Salim Ismail highlights that U.S. data centers consume 17 billion gallons of water annually, significantly less than golf courses (531 billion gallons) or California almond farming (1 trillion gallons).

Protocol (6)

• Connor Brown explains the Bitcoin Policy Institute intervened as a defendant in a lawsuit claiming dormant Bitcoin addresses as abandoned property, using BPI's long-term treasury as an example of non-dormant institutional holdings.
• Sam Lyman's research for BPI on CCP influence in US anti-data center campaigns gained significant attention, being featured on the front page of the New York Times.
• BPI made its quarterly report public for the first time, highlighting activities from April to June 2026.
• Anchor Watch launched multi-institution custody with Coin Corner and Lloyd's insurance, offering users a custodial solution where three separate institutions hold keys to mitigate single-point failure.
• Bitcoin's current price is $63,410 with a $1.27 trillion market cap, and the network is 1,181 blocks from a difficulty retarget estimated at a -0.7% adjustment.
• Mempool transaction fees are low, with 2 sats/vbyte for high priority and 0.2 sats/vbyte for no priority currently clearing next blocks.

Lightning (2)

• A Zeus and Axiom report on Lightning economics shows Olympus achieved a 4.65% return on invested capital over the trailing twelve months, comparable to treasury yields.
• The report also details using Validating Lightning Signer (VLS) to separate node operation from key custody, allowing professional routing management without surrendering fund control.

Stablecoins (1)

• Nunchuck Android 2.7.1 added self-custodial USDT on Liquid, noted as the most private Tether option due to confidential transactions hiding amounts and asset types.