A Mysterious Ox

Hi there,

Would you use a genius AI that refused to tell you who built it, but was definitely using your data to improve itself?

What I'm Seeing in AI

Who is Ox Alpha?

Last Thursday a model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter, the site where you can try every AI model in one place.

Three days later, 221,000 people were using it and it had chewed through 16 trillion tokens. It was as good as any other AI model, and free to use.

This week the mask came off: it’s Z.ai, a Chinese lab, and it runs on Chinese chips. Why give away that much intelligence for free?

Because the usage is the payment. Hundreds of thousands of real coding sessions are exactly the data that trains the next model. China is cooking right now.

The big US labs are stuck. They have their own safety worries about releasing better models, and at the same time open source is catching up behind them.

Every top open model right now is Chinese. Surely the US labs respond soon??

Good Luck Buying a GPU

The catch with all this free open intelligence: you need something to run it on, and the hardware market has gone mad.

A global memory shortage has doubled the price of AI graphics cards in a year, with no relief expected before late 2027.

Meanwhile Apple announced a new Mac Studio this week that can run serious AI models on your desk.

One of AI’s top analysts reckons anyone can make money right now buying compute and selling intelligence by the token. I costed it this week: true if you have $15 million and a rack in a data centre, false at desk scale.

But owning your own intelligence is getting interesting at our scale too. More below.

What I'm Building

Distribution is King

I turned 23 on Monday, and I thought it was time to take the leap on social media.

I want to grow my newsletter to 10,000 people, so step one, I made a better page for people to subscribe at here.

The more I learn running a business, the more I realise that there’s one thing that sets people and businesses apart - the amount of eyeballs they get on their work.

A Data Centre in Every Home

Everyone hates data centres. The common thinking is that they drink power and water, get built next to suburbs, and they destroy communities.

Here’s the alternative future I keep thinking about: the compute lives where the people are.

A little box in your cupboard, next to the Wi-Fi router, running your family’s AI. The same box in every office, running the company’s. Your data never leaves the building.

Cheap open models like the Ox make it possible. And instead of one mega-facility nobody wants nearby, the load spreads across millions of homes and offices: broadly distributed data centres.

It’s a space we’re thinking about getting into.

Would you have one in your cupboard?

A startup Nvidia has partnered with that makes Data Centres in your back yard (that white box)