Pour Moi, C'est Le Déluge

Welcome to the Tech Reboot ride home for Thursday, 02/12/2026. I'm Brian McCullough today, and right on time, here come the Chinese AI models. Elon Musk Musk kicks off a major reorg of XAI. Google is warning of AI distillation attacks. New Waymo cars hit the road. And another interesting AI essay to read to you. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, the deluge has begun. The deluge of Chinese AI models, I mean. ZAI, also known as Zipu, has launched GLM five saying its flagship open weight model has, quote, best in class performance among all open source models in reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks. Note again, open weights as Chinese companies are want to do, but also they're going after the hotness right now, which is, of course, agents, quoting Reuters. The open source GLM five model features enhanced coding capabilities and the ability to perform long running agent tasks approaching rival Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 encoding benchmark tests and surpassing Google's Gemini three Pro on some benchmarks, the company said in a press release. The latest model was developed using domestically manufactured chips for inference, including Huawei's flagship Ascend chip and products from leading industry players such as MoreThreads, CambraCon, and Kunluksen according to the statement. Zipu is considered one of China's AI Tigers, a group of promising AI startups in the country, vying with The United States to lead the development of this frontier technology. Jipoo went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last month alongside rival MiniMax, another AI Tiger. Both stocks have rallied strongly as investors bet on the companies benefiting from China's AI boom. The GLM five release follows a series of updates including version 4.7 last month and version 4.6 in September. The latest model is also optimized for working with AI agents such as Open Claw, the company said. The company has positioned its models as having strong coding and agentic capabilities that can perform multi step tasks. Jipoo, which faces US sanctions, derives most of its revenue from the domestic Chinese market but has overseas ambitions. Chief executive Zhang Peng told Reuters in a September interview that overseas revenue was beginning to gain traction, though the company has yet to directly compete with US models in consumer subscriptions, end quote. Well, speaking of another Tiger mentioned there, Mini Max today released m 2.5 claiming that model delivers on the quote intelligence too cheap to meter promise that it made recently, priced at 30¢ per 1,000,000 input tokens and a dollar 20 per 1,000,000 output tokens, which okay. That's aggressive. And ByteDance's new AI video generation model, Seedance two point zero, that I told you about recently, has apparently gone viral in China with one state backed newspaper saying it is bigger than DeepSeek's Sputnik moment, quoting Reuters again. ByteDance which officially unveiled Seedance two point zero on Thursday said in a statement that the system was designed for professional film, e commerce, and advertising …