A Ferrari with No Fuel

Hi there,

Did you know sharks are older than trees? They’ve existed for ~450 million years, so they predate trees by ~90 million years.

What I'm Seeing in AI

Kimi K3 - OpenSource Frenzy

Kimi K3 is a new model this week, released from a Chinese AI lab called Moonshot that has flooded the media. It is fully open source.

I wrote about what open source actually is a few issues ago (Please Don’t Take my Brain). Short version: the model is free to download and run yourself. You just need the hardware and the know-how.

The numbers are mad. 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weight model ever released.

On benchmark testing it ranks third of all models, behind only Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. An open model, right on the heels of the best closed ones.

A CEO summarised it to me yesterday in simple terms - “You don’t drive your Ferrari to the chicken shop”. For 98% of what you do, you don’t need the most powerful model on earth.

Kimi is like “a way cheaper car, that’s just as fast. But there’s no fuel.” It’s free to use the model, but there aren’t enough servers on the planet to serve it properly right now, so you end up back in the Ferrari (Claude), who have all the servers and power.

People also ask about hosting one of these inside their own company, so their data never leaves the building. Fair instinct, especially with a Chinese model, where clients get nervous about their data sitting on servers in China.

But our dev Jeremy reckons doing it properly runs upwards of $1.6 million just to begin. Not exactly a weekend project. Easier to stick with a thirty dollar subscription for now.

All that said, we’re going deep on open source, because I think in the long term this will be the way. I’m about to buy a Mac mini to tinker with, and we’ve already moved a bunch of our workflows onto these cheaper open models.

Cool New Tool

Remotion CLI was released this week too.

You describe a video in plain English, and Claude makes it on your computer.

This reinforces what I’ve been thinking - AI is already there. The capability exists, we’re the ones slowing progress down by not using it.

And here’s one I made in one prompt:

If you could pause time and let everyone just play with what already exists for a year, the world would look completely different on the other side. We’re all just catching up.

What I'm Building

AI Dosage

I keep playing with this idea of AI fry - my first-hand experience of AI work encouraging constant switching that melts my brain and attention span, like TikTok for work.

To fight it, I ran an experiment this week. I did only 1-2 AI tasks at a time, as opposed to my record of 23 Claude sessions in a day last week.

It felt like I did less initially, but overall was great for my energy levels, and also for what I made. Often the 1-2 things I made a day were finished products, rather than 8 half-finished things.

It matches this idea we’ve found with building things for clients:

Often with AI it is so easy to spin up the demo or first version, but that final 10% that gets the thing working takes real focus and time - that part hasn’t changed.

Emails Emails & More Emails

We’ve now got our AI email tool up and live for clients which is awesome. It sorts emails, flags urgent ones for follow-up and even drafts responses.

Our client gave incredibly positive feedback, starting from sorting 600 emails/day manually before, to now running the tool 24/7 to manage them.

Something I realised building this is how heavily reliant the whole corporate world is still on emails. However, if in a few years, everyone has AI reading and writing their emails, they’re useless right?

Curious if people would use this, or they think email is dead?

4 people responded last week - love to see it!

Random Thought - I watched Moneyball again last night, it made me wonder if sports are using much AI now to predict team outcomes and make trades

See you next Friday,

Finlay

Explore the rest of my writing here → finlayekins.com/writing

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