Pretty sure this ruling will be used as a precedent in cases against the other providers really soon. As I understand it, there is a legal cottage industry that brings digital related cases (eg. Copyright) in Germany.
Qwen is definitely the model to beat as of Mid 2026. While I didn't benchmark with SWE as my use cases are OpenClaw [1]. I found both Qwen 3.6 35B A3B and more impressively Qwen 3.5 122B A10B starting to be competitive with closed flash models. The NVFP4 quant of the latter is what I'm running now on DGX.
How does qwen compare to deepseek or kimi? I haven't spent much time with qwen but I find deepseek to be mostly comparable to opus for my pet projects. Kimi k2.6 did a lot of stupid stuff and talked to itself a lot "let me do X... Wait, X doesn't make sense because the user explicitly said Y"
Deepseek seems to seek first to understand before going off.
Deepseek is too large for me to self host on Spark. I was actually using Deepseek as my cloud backup and it performed well but then read the T&C which doesn't give as strong data protection guarantees unlike Google and Alibaba. Kimi is again massive and cloud hosted APIs are fairly expensive compared and it also has weak T&C, so have only benched but not tested. In general I found that with OpenClaw it works better to turn Reasoning off.
I think there's possibly value to try fine tuning Qwen 3.5 on my OpenClaw turns log to see if performance improves. The one recent model I haven't tested yet is Nemotron 3 Super which I might bench soon.
What is "finish the job"? Iran is a large populous country that's mostly been a unified polity since Cyrus the Great. They are a different people and culture from their Arab neighbours - how will the Arabs rule and why will the Persians follow them? A colonial rule by the US will be more disastrous than the experience in Iraq or Afghanistan - in those days cheap autonomous drones didn't drop grenades on soldiers.
The present US President is smart enough to realise that now. In this case he let himself be misled by Israelis & their supporters that Iranians would rise up and replace their own Government. That indeed might have happened if the US had intervened when the Iranians were actually protesting some months before the present crisis. Now the US administration is looking for a way out without putting boots on the ground and Iran is looking to haggle on the price and for the US. this very business like cutting of ones losses is almost certainly the right move.
Given their precarious domestic supply situation, it's been surprising they haven't chosen to lead the world on electrification of transport. China had much the same equation and have clearly gone through other way. In my recent visit, I was told in big cities buying a gasoline powdered vehicle takes months or years in permits but an electric vehicle can be bought instantly.
Only if you insist on passing on global prices into your domestic economy. Not doing this is very difficult if you're a net importer but very much possible if you're a producer. This "leaves money on the table" but it is very much a choice (with different consequences), just one that rarely occurs to people who have grown up in highly capitalist economies.
This is also why historically companies have preferred being vertically integrated to avoid having their supply chains exposed until American economists and brokerages started pushing the cult of specialization. Outside of the US, big conglomerates still operate this way.
> Only if you insist on passing on global prices into your domestic economy. Not doing this is very difficult if you're a net importer but very much possible if you're a producer. This "leaves money on the table" but it is very much a choice (with different consequences), just one that rarely occurs to people who have grown up in highly capitalist economies.
They tried this before [0], and calling it controversial would be an understatement. Probably not a great idea to try it again right before the Alberta succession referendum [1].
Concord was very old technology. I am quite sure a clean sheet now
1. Would have much lower sonic booms thanks to recent research (quite a bit of it by NASA on wing geometry) and more importantly computer simulation available now
2. The engines would be far more fuel efficient
3. The flights would be able to have better efficiency in the subsonic regime as well. Just see what winglets and the like have done to fuel economy .
I fly 14 to 18 hour routes maybe 4-5 times a year on business paying 5x the economy cost and it still sucks. Breaking the flight with a connection (IMO) sucks more. My management flies such routes every month. There is a lot of revenue headroom in that fare gap for something that flies maybe 3x-4x as fast which military aircraft already do.
What will hold back the idea is conservatism among the business managers in aircraft manufactures and incumbent airlines who will "draw lessons" from a 50 year old experiment
not really. In supersonic regime Concorde engines were pretty good, and you'd not beat them today by much.
Concorde was using afterburners to accelerate to supersonic and this is where it burned a lot of fuel. Designing engines which would give you good thrust at subsonic speeds without afterburners and would still perform well in supersonic is still much unsolved. Just look at the best military engines today - they all under Mach 2 and can't give even 3000 miles range.
And without increasing efficiency we can't really get much beyond the Concorde's 4500 miles. I.e. unfortunately there seems to be no current tech (or coming right tomorrow morning) that will allow Trans-Pacific.
It looks more feasible to me that Starship suborbital SFO-to-Shanghai will come well before a new Concorde on that route. Especially considering that Starship's ballistic trajectory is more fuel efficient on such long distances than supersonic plane flight.
It'd be far more efficient than the 50 year old tech, but so is the baseline tech they're comparing it with, and the market has optimised heavily for price competition (and has a lot more private jets doing exactly the route and time executives with Concorde money want) and needs speed somewhat less when it's a lot easier to stay in touch with a business whilst inflight. Ultimately there's not much to draw lessons from that suggests it's going to sell enough aircraft to recover the investment of building and certifying it (even comparatively simple niche aircraft like the A380 struggled there), which is why even Boom is now reinventing itself as a provider of turbines for AI datacentres to try to fund its development costs...
Benchmarking the kind of cost savings I'm seeing moving from sonnet and gemini flash to local models, inference runs at least 90-95% gross margins. So they are probably still gross margin profitable.
BTW form my benchmarking, open weigh models are good enough for many agentic tasks starting with Qwen 3.5/6 family and Deepseek v4 family, so it's likely we'll see displacement of api usage from the premium priced providers. Yes trainingis expensive, this isn't training
https://github.com/antirez/ds4
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