Why AI Washing Won’t Work Much Longer

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, what a new Chinese open-weight model release has to do with big shifts in enterprise AI thinking. And before that, on the headlines, Palantir and the March to AI Sovereignty. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:21All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Airtable, Section, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIDailyBrief.ai. This week, tech earnings continue with Palantir, registering another monster quarter. Quarterly revenue came in at$1.94 billion, up 93 % from this time last year and beating expectations. Commercial sales were up 149 % year over year, up from 133 % growth rate in Q1, demonstrating that enterprise AI demand is still booming, despite flashy headlines of token budget cuts.

1:02Indeed, it turns out that caps, which by the way, most organizations haven't even gotten close to that level yet, are not the same as cuts. Palantir also managed to expand profit margins, with net income reaching a billion dollars for the quarter and growing at a 225 % annual pace. CEO Alex Karp described the quarter as otherworldly and used the earnings as a chance to proclaim the message that he has been getting increasingly loud about on his bully pulpit. He basically painted Palantir's results as an expression of the demand for AI sovereignty. He said, Palantir is the only company that has demonstrated it can transform tokens into actual economic value.

1:36Our customers trust us to provide them with maximal control over their operations, data, and decisions. Palantir hiked annual forecasts, sending the stock surging by 10 % in after-hours trading, with maximal control over their operations, data, and decisions. This was the message that he echoed in his shareholder letter as well. Karp wrote, Every organization in the world is awakening to the risks of handing the creators of language models the keys to their institutions, of letting these models loose within their homes. The demand from our partners is clear. It is for control over data, the prompts that the models ingest, and more fundamentally, the organizational and business intelligence, their alpha, that the language labs are not only ready and willing, but structurally designed to capture from their customers.

2:14Later in the letter, he continued, We do not get paid for clicks or tokens or chats. The gamification of the most significant development in modern economic history seems to us misplaced. The usage of a platform may hint at its value, but is by no means dispositive. And many are now finding out that consumption and usage alone have little or nothing to do with the production of results. Just to add a little fire to all of it, he then says, There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business. Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.

2:44The limitations and faults of the token industrial complex, which has threatened to overtake and dominate the world economy, have increasingly been exposed. We have always declined and will continue to decline, entering into a parasitic relationship with our partners. In a follow-up interview with CNBC, Cart made it clear exactly who he takes issue with. He said, We have people trying to drug addict us to a future they believe they control. Now, I've spent a lot of time with Dario and the Effective Altruism crew. They want to tell you we have to march into a future where we own nothing, where your businesses aren't profitable, where none of us have jobs, and where our adversaries win.

3:16Now, of course, these are not the type of comments that everyone is going to take at face value, and they generated a wide range of opinions. Summing up the most optimistic version of the take, Amit is investing, writes, The age of AI is not about valuations, but about empowering workers, enabling agency, and growing GDP. Now, speaking of companies that are taking issue with the frontier labs, Apple right now is of course embroiled in a lawsuit with OpenAI, claiming that via an employee who left Apple to join OpenAI, the LLM lab stole Apple trade secrets. OpenAI is biting back. In a new letter, they wrote, Apple is getting this wrong.

3:50Apple, they write, is one of the greatest companies of all time and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This careless, aggressive, and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn't live up to that reputation. Now, the big jaw drop line was this one. Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn't respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names only after we brought this to their attention. Which honestly, if true, brought up some big questions with the lawsuit for many folks watching this from the outside.

4:20Now, at this stage, this is a little bit more psychodrama than we normally get into on this show. it'll be worth paying attention to if it actually shifts the plans that OpenAI can make with hardware. For now, that was just such a wild mistake to make that I had to capture the zeitgeist of the AIX community by sharing it with you here. Moving on to some other comments that are getting attention, Google DeepMind's chief strategy officer has reframed SkyHigh CapEx as a down payment on recursive self-improvement. During a panel at UC Berkeley, Jesjeet Sikhan said that RSI was a key part of the investment thesis.

4:51Now, if you've been listening closely, this earnings season has been all about how the ROI of AI lines up with endlessly ramping CapEx. Google in particular was punished for their AI income failing to live up with AI spending on the short term as free cash flow flipped negative. This particular Google executive acknowledged that current AI revenues, quote, don't sustain the capital expenditures we're making so far, creating a, quote, danger we could hit an AI air pocket such that the expenditures happen but the revenues don't show up. However, he argues that the CapEx build-out is not about near-term revenue, but instead the, quote, biggest scientific bet civilization has ever made.

5:22Next up, an interesting good news story in cybersecurity as Claude helps researchers uncover a decades-old vulnerability in DNA evidence databases used in criminal prosecution. At labs across the country, forensic scientists keep DNA samples as digital files to create a searchable database. A group of researchers have found that they could alter the files using code written by Claude in a process that takes around 45 minutes. The core issue is that this database software was created in 1995 and includes none of the tamper-evident protections of modern software. One of the researchers, forensic scientist and New Haven University professor Laura Gadoch-Kalm said, Effectively, what we have are data files that are legitimately referred to as the gold standard of forensic science that lack the same level of tamper evident markings that we require for a paper bag.

6:05Now, the ramifications are concerning. A bad actor with rudimentary knowledge of how DNA testing works and access to the database could corrupt files or even modify evidence to frame an innocent person. None of the labs around the nation have reported any kind of this evidence tampering, but they also haven't been able to figure out a way to detect if tampering has occurred. As part of their disclosure, researchers noted that some of the encryption still being used relies on an encryption key that's been available on the internet for years. The creator of the database software said that they have been working closely with the U.S.

6:32Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency on mitigations and have pushed a software update to implement digital signatures. Sarah Chu, the Director of Policy and Reform at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, said that the research highlights how badly behind the forensic sector is. She said,

6:54Now for the AI folks, this highlights what many have been saying about how critical it is to be very conscientious about guardrails on frontier models. This is an example where defense-focused researchers were able to find serious vulnerabilities in ancient systems still being used in a very high-stakes field. It is absolutely the case that there are hundreds or even thousands of outdated systems like this running critical infrastructure across society. Cost is a huge part, perhaps the biggest part, of why these systems haven't been overhauled or even properly tested for vulnerabilities. While it's obviously not perfect, the ability to do even rudimentary testing using AI on a modest budget could be an absolute game-changer for this sort of software.

7:31TLDR, while yes, it is scary that cybercriminals have a new suite of powerful tools, AI is and remains a massive upgrade for cyber defenders as well. Lastly today, one that we will pick up on I'm sure tomorrow, the White House is hosting a set of AI companies to discuss the administration's voluntary review framework for frontier models. I am very interested to see what comes out of that, but let's wait until we have some more solid reporting. For now, that's going to do it for today's headlines. Next up, the main episode.

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11:11Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are talking about the latest model release, which is Quen 3.8 Max. But the context we're putting it in is a little bit different than normal. As you know, I am just back from KPMG's Tech and Innovation Symposium last week, and my biggest takeaway was about just how radically the conversation had shifted over the last year. When I was there for their 2025 edition, we were still genuinely talking about things like the percentage of organizations that had one, two, or three AI use cases. This year, we were talking about how organizations are handling the complex governance issues that arise from everyone having powerful coding tools, and how people are dealing with cost provisioning issues and different models across different parts of their organization, and whether they should be looking into fine-tuning OpenWeights models and have an OpenWeights models policy.

11:57Point being that the level of sophistication around AI, and more importantly, the quality of the questions that enterprises are asking, has increased dramatically. Meaning that my guess is, for the first time, some meaningful number of enterprise buyers, not just early adopter developer types, but actual enterprise IT type folks, are actively paying attention when things like the new Quen 3.8 Max model comes out. So first, let's talk about the model. Like KimiK3, it is a large model, this one coming in at 2.4 trillion parameters. Indeed, Leighton Space writes that the model would have been the top open model in the world, but for the recent KimiK3 release.

12:32The official Alibaba Quen account calls it a new bar for coding and co-work, and points to examples of its work on autonomous coding, 10 plus days of self-evolving development from empty folder to production without hand-holding, sharing a complete project trace on their GitHub. They also laud production quality deliverables across hundreds of professions, systems-level autonomous planning with closed-loop adaptive learning, and native multimodal intelligence. Vision they write isn't just input, it's a continuous feedback loop for planning, execution, and self-correction. Now, at least on the self-reported benchmarks, there are some pretty impressive numbers.

13:04Alibaba reports a terminal bench score that puts them between Fable 5 and GPT-5-6-SOL, a co-work bench score between Sol and Fable 5, visual reasoning and research reproduction that are totally state-of-the-art, and so on and so forth. They also report state-of-the-art on OS World Verified, which is agentic computer use, which if that result is accurate, is one of the more significant when it comes to its applicability as an agentic work tool. Now interestingly, a lot of the discourse online was not about the model itself, but about the video ad that they released it with. The ad, which is an incredibly simple concept very well executed, is a laptop in the foreground doing all sorts of different types of work.

13:43There's coding work, science work, different types of knowledge work. And in the background, you see the humans presumably paired with that laptop off doing more of the things that make them, well, enjoy their lives. There's a guy fishing at one point, another man playing tennis, a woman rock climbing, and another woman reading. In other words, without using basically any words, Quen is saying that the value to your life as an individual of these incredibly powerful and advanced models is to give you more time to do the things that you actually want to do. Jason Calacanis from All In tweeted, not only is China making increasingly competitive models, they're also making world-positive AI marketing.

14:18The computers are going to do our jobs for us, and we're all going to the beach. Nansen's Alex Venevic writes, what is this marketing? No graveyards? No entry-level jobs disappearing? Vittorio also points out that it seems like perhaps they are trolling us a little bit, with using one of the examples being verifying protein sources, given these strict guardrails on Fable. And yet, one of the big deals about this announcement is that it represents a return for Alibaba and the Quesn series back to OpenWeights models. Last year, there was a lot of personnel shifting around Quesn, and for their largest Max series models, they moved from open to closed.

14:52In fact, it brought up the question more broadly of whether this was something that was just going to be more commonplace for Chinese models as they got more advanced and got closer to the frontier. Well, now they are back, and as Yuchen Jin points out, This marks the first time Quen will open-source the weights of a Quen Max class model. The full weights will be released next week. Strawberry Labs' Chirag Asarpota writes, This is so huge for open models. Chinese labs are clearly taking advantage of Anthropik's recent PR mess and are going all in on open weights. The message is loud. They want Chinese open models to dominate globally.

15:23Yet maybe the even bigger deal is the price. One of the things that I've talked about on this show a lot recently is that many folks, particularly around the policy sector, still have this idea that every Chinese model is cents on the dollar relative to their state-of-the-art American competitors. That hasn't been the case for a while. In fact, to give you one example, while Kimi K3 is cheaper than Opus, it's only cheaper by about 40%. $15 per million output tokens versus$25 per million output tokens. Quen, however, takes it down significantly. Quen is being priced at$2 per million input and$6 per million output tokens, making it a little more than a third of the price of Kimi and a fifth of the price of Opus.

16:00Now, that's still not the pennies on the dollar that some people assume, but it is a much more significant decrease than, for example, Kimi K3. Now, given all of this, it's not surprising that a lot of the first impressions were excited. Alex Volkov from the Thursday AI podcast writes, Alibaba is back? Quen 3.8 Max is about to get open-weighted with 2.4 trillion parameters. This model comes very close to K3 running projects for 16 days. But it is worth being at least a little cautious at this early stage. When it comes to independent benchmarks, Artificial Analysis did publish Quen 3.8 Max's score of 53, which puts them four points behind Kimi K3 and even a point behind Grok 4.5.

16:38Now, adding some intrigue to the whole thing, Artificial Analysis quickly took down those scores without any explanation, so we'll have to see what was going on with that. On some of Ethan Mollick's tests, he writes, Basic impression after a bunch of experiments is that it is a solid model, but not Kimi K3 level in my experience so far. Datum writes, Quen 3.8 Max is unusable, saying that they tested it across coding, design planning, agent orchestration, and multiple harnesses, and running it against Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, GLM 5.2, GPT Luna, and Opus 5, with Quen coming in last every time. He says it's extremely slow, unstable, and burns through usage like crazy.

17:10It often fails on the first attempt, then the second, and sometimes the third. Pavel Huren also tested it on his bug bench test, which has two real repos with 105 hidden bugs, and found that it found 19 out of 105 bugs. Kimi K3 and Opus 5 were both the head fixing 21, GPT-56 Sol led at 42. And while he noted that Quinn did fix one bug that none of the other 10 models he tested found, that quote, just getting it to run took 5 attempts. One coding agent used up the 5-hour subscription quota in half an hour. The pay-as-you-go key exhausted its free tier, then refused to bill until I opened a different console.

17:42All in all, the cost was about$31, leading Pavel to conclude, let me save you some money and time. GPT 5.6 Luna ran the same benchmark for$1.80 and fixed$33. Grok 4.5 judged$16 in 25 minutes. So first evidence suggests some good reason to be skeptical about the published benchmark numbers. But ultimately, why it's still an exciting release to people is the fact that it's coming in open weights, which means they're going to be able to get their hands on it in a totally different type of way. Which gets us to my contention from the beginning of the show, that despite this being the type of model release that in the past would only be something that was really paid attention to by developers and early adopters.

18:16Increasingly, there are going to be folks inside big mainstream corporations and enterprises who are paying attention to this as well. Now, also yesterday, the New York Times published an opinion piece from the former chief information officer for Lululemon, Julie Averill. The piece, which remember is titled not by the author of the piece, but by the headline writers at the New York Times, was I helped run Lululemon, Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About AI. Now, to some extent, this is the platonic archetype right now of the average essay about enterprise AI. The first part is all about how common it is for corporations to want to use AI for PR value rather than actually integrating it deeply into strategy.

18:52Julie coins a term AI wishing, which she defines as the belief by company leaders that AI is magic, that you can wave its wand towards a hard problem and skip the work of solving it. But don't mistake this as a critique of AI. It is not. It's a critique instead of the very real human processes that impact how AI gets integrated. She writes,

19:21And then in the most important line, she concludes, this kind of work doesn't happen in a quarter, and believing that it can is the trap. And so in this context, not only did we get AI wishing, we got AI washing. As she puts it, the insidious cousin of AI wishing, that is when a company, under pressure to immediately show results, claims to be doing more with AI than it actually is. Now, the most negative and problematic version of this is the AI layoff. Quote, A company proclaims it needs fewer people because AI made its operations more efficient. Often the efficiency doesn't exist yet. The cut is really about freeing up cash, sometimes to spend more on AI.

19:58In May, she continues, U.S. employers announced 97 ,000 job cuts, and according to one research firm, companies blamed 40 % of them on AI. A separate survey found that around one-third of hiring managers who had cut a role because of AI had already rehired for the same or a similar one. Of course they did. They eliminated positions before redesigning the work, so the work shifted onto the people who remained. Then companies quietly hired back some of the capability they claimed AI had replaced. That cycle burns money and loses the talent and experience that was pushed out of the door, not to mention the trust of the people asked to stay.

20:30Now I think at this point my perspective on this is very well-trodden territory. I think the organizations that view AI strictly as an efficiency technology, rather than as an opportunity technology, might be able to eke out a few headline wins in the short term, but are ultimately going to be absolutely pummeled by the companies who understand that this is a redesign moment that opens up massive new opportunities, not a chance to make shareholders excited about cost cuts for Q3. In short, AI is going to take work to do well. It is going to involve organizational redesign, job role redesign, process redesign, and shortcuts are bound to fail.

21:05And so how did these two stories intersect? Quen 3.8 Max on the one hand, and this cautionary tale about AI wishing and washing in the enterprise on the other? Well, what it comes down to is that the change in the conversation that I was mentioning as exemplified by the KPMG event, and the sophistication that it implicates, shows that more and more enterprise AI leaders are asking the right type of questions. For example, there is increasingly a discourse about whether OpenWeight's models can be part of a complete AI system that involves different types of models for different types of tasks. Despite headlines which suggest only blunt tools like cost caps, the reality in practice is that basically every enterprise AI leader that I interact with is digging deep to actually understand what their approach to, on the one hand, wanting more AI consumption, and on the other, needing to manage costs, should actually be.

21:56One part of that is discourse about open-weight models. A year ago, almost no company had any sort of actually expressed policy when it came to these models. Other than, lol, of course we're not going to use Chinese models. Now that conversation has really changed. Just yesterday, I saw a Forbes guest op-ed about why leaders should learn about open-weight models. And of course, regular listeners will know that it's not just op-eds. Increasingly, we have companies that are offering access not only to cheaper models, but to the ability to customize and fine-tune them based on your organization's unique needs and data.