China just released an open source AI model that matches the best closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Gavin Baker explained exactly how they did it and the answer should concern every American AI lab. The model is called GLM 5.2. It was built by Z. AI. You get... 744 billion parameters, 1 million token context window and its MIT license, meaning anyone can download it, fork it, build a company on it, with no restrictions and no Dario. It scored 51 points on the artificial analysis intelligence index. The highest score any open weight model has ever achieved. It beat GPT 5.5 on the frontier software engineering benchmark. It trails Claude Opus 4.8 by less than one percentage point. And it costs 85% less to run than GPT 5.5 for comparable performance. Gavin Baker said on the All-In podcast that this model has challenged some of his beliefs. Then he explained how China built it. The method is called distillation. Just think of tens of thousands of phones and computers running simultaneously, all hitting the frontier model APIs through masked accounts, asking specific questions, and harvesting what happens inside the model when it answers. Every reasoning step, every token. The entire thinking process gets recorded and fed back into the Chinese model during training. It is a cheat sheet. It is the answer key to the exam. And here is the part that should worry everyone. Sacks said it plainly. China was already nine months behind American models. But now that GLM 5.2 is good enough to run its own reinforcement learning, it can improve itself without needing to distill from American models anymore. The cheat sheet let them get close enough to start writing their own answers. Sacks said we are six months behind on the model and 24 months behind on silicon and they are only a few months behind in total. The Z. AI founder told Elon Musk directly that open weight fable-level capability will be here before Q1 2027. Every restriction Anthropic lobbied for, every self-imposed safety guardrail, every month of delay in releasing American frontier models accelerated this. The Chinese labs were not under those restrictions. They were not going to wait. The composable model future Gavin described, where every enterprise runs a frontier model alongside their own fine-tuned open weight model, is coming regardless of what American labs do next. The question is just whether the open weight half of that stack is American or Chinese. Right now it is Chinese. WATCH THE FULL PODCAST ON The All-In Podcastshow more

Ihtesham Ali

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