Tech Brew Ride Home - Pour Moi, C'est Le Déluge

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Aaannddd…. Right on time here come the Chinese AI models. Elon 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. Chinese AI startup Zhipu releases new flagship model GLM-5 (Reuters) Musk announces xAI re-org following co-founder departures, SpaceX merger (CNBC) Elon Musk Wants to Build an A.I. Satellite Factory on the Moon (NYTimes) Google says attackers used 100,000+ prompts to try to clone AI chatbot Gemini (NBCNews) Waymo begins deploying next-gen Ojai robotaxis to extend its U.S. lead (CNBC) The AI Vampire (Steve Yegge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew right home for Thursday, February 12th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. And right on time. Here come the Chinese AI models. Elon 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 Jipu, has launched GLM5, 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 wont to do, but also they're going after the

hotness right now, which is, of course, agents, quoting Reuters. The open source GLM5 model features enhanced coding capabilities and the ability to perform long-running agent tasks approaching rival Anthropics Claude Opus 4.5 in coding benchmark tests and surpassing Google's Gemini 3 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 more threads, Camber Khan and Kunuksen, according to the statement. Jipu is considered one of China's AI Tigers, a group of promising AI startups in the country, fying with the United States to lead the development of this frontier

technology. Jeep who 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-5 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 OpenClaw, the company said. The company has position. its models as having strong coding and agentic capabilities that can perform multi-step tasks. Jipu, which faces U.S. 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 U.S. models in consumer subscriptions, end quote. Well, speaking of another Tiger mentioned there, Minimax today, released M2.5, claiming that model delivers on the, quote, intelligence too cheap to meter promise that it made recently. Priced at 30 cents per one million input tokens and a dollar 20 per one million output tokens, which, okay, that's aggressive. And BightDance's new AI video generation model C-Dance 2.0 that I told you about recently

has apparently gone viral in China with one state-backed newspaper saying it is bigger than Deep Seek's Sputnik moment. Quoting Reuters again, ByteDance, which officially unveiled Seed Dance 2.0 on Thursday, said in a statement that the system was designed for professional film, e-commerce, and advertising productions because it was capable of processing text, images, audio, and video simultaneously lowering the cost of creating content. On Chinese social media, Seedance 2.0 drew comparisons to DeepSeek's meteoric rise to fame. Earlier last year, the release of Deepseek R1 sparked heated debate in the U.S. tech community over a Sputnik moment. Chinese state-backed newspaper Global Times wrote in an editorial on Wednesday. This year, the continued breakout success of C-Dance 2.0 and similar innovations has gone even further, giving rise to a wave of admiration for China within Silicon Valley, end quote.

The buzz generated by Cedance 2.0 was underscored when the world's richest man, Elon Musk, replied to a post praising the model on his social media platform X by commenting, it's happening fast. Users on China's Wibo-blogging platform shared videos generated by the AI model that showcase the complexity and image quality of its output, no matter how bizarre the prompt. One two-minute video, which had been viewed around a million times on Waiibo, depicted rapper and record producer Yi, formerly known as Kanye West, and reality TV star Kim Kardashian as characters in a palace drama set in Imperial China,

speaking and singing in Mandarin, end quote. Elon Musk went ahead and announced a major reorganization of XAI that, quote, required parting ways with some people, after two XAI co-founders said they were leaving this week. XAI will be reorganized into four core areas, GROCS chatbot and voice products, coding, imagine, and Microhard, which will build digital agents to run companies. Again, Microhard is a typical Elon joke, but it's technically more of a play on the name Microsoft. Also, at an all-hands meeting, Elon continued to walk back his Mars ambitions for SpaceX, telling employees that XAI and SpaceX need a factory on the moon, to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space. Quoting CNBC,

the organizational overhaul was done, quote, to improve speed of execution, Musk said in a post on X. He did not say which employees may have been cut as a result of the restructuring or which employees may have resigned of their own volition. We are hiring aggressively, Musk added. Earlier this week, XAI co-founders Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu announced their exits after several other founding members, including Igor Babushkin, Kyle Kosik, Christian Segerty and Greg Yang previously departed, end quote, quoting Bloomberg.

What matters is velocity and acceleration, Musk told employees, if you are moving faster, you will be the leader. He also thanked the people who have departed the company. Most of the AI compute is going to be understanding real-time video generation, Musk said, and we expect to be leaders in that. Nikita Beer, who is in charge of X's product, said the social network and its adjacent apps, including Grock, have reached about one billion users. January was the best month ever in terms of engagement for X, he said. He also noted that new users spend 55% more time a day in the app than they did six months ago.

The app has been rebuilt to be better than ever and is now generating $1 billion in annual recurring revenue tied to subscriptions, he said, end quote. And quoting the times. You have to go to the moon, Mr. Musk said during an all-hands meeting, which was heard by the New York Times. The move would help XAA harness more power than other companies to build its AI, he said. It's difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it's going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen, he added. Mr. Musk's fixation with the moon is a recent one. Since founding SpaceX in 2002, he has said making humanity multi-planetary first by establishing a colony on Mars was the company's raison d'etra. But in recent months, he has posted frequently on X's social media platform about the company's new focus, which is the moon.

Two former SpaceX executives told the times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about corporate plans, that the moon had never been a main focus for the company. In his remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Musk described the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. First, he said the company would build a self-sustaining city on the moon, then travel to Mars and finally explore star systems in search of aliens. If you're moving faster than anyone else in any given technology arena, you will be the leader. And XAI is moving faster than any other company. No one's even close, Mr. Musk said. Because we've reached a certain scale, we're organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. And actually, when this happens,

there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages, end quote. Google says Gemini has been inundated by commercially motivated actors who are trying to clone it, including one campaign that prompted Gemini more than 100,000 times, quoting NBC News. In a report published Thursday, Google said it has increasingly come under what are known as distillation attacks or repeated questions designed to get a chatbot to reveal its inner workings. Google described the activity as model extraction in which would-be copycats probe the system for the patterns and logic that make it work. The attackers appear to want to use the information to build or bolster their own AI, it said. The company believes the culprits are

mostly private companies or researchers looking to gain a competitive advantage. A spokesperson told NBC News that Google believes the attacks have come from around the world, but declined to share additional details about what was known about the suspects. The scope of the attacks on Gemini indicates that they are most likely, or soon will be, common against smaller companies' custom AI tools as well, said John Holtquist, the chief analyst of Google's threat intelligence group. We are going to be the canary in the coal mine for far more incidents. Holtquist said, he declined to name suspects. The company considers distillation to be intellectual property theft, it said. Even though they have mechanisms to try to identify distillation attacks,

and block the people behind them. Major LLMs are inherently vulnerable to distillation because they are open to anyone on the internet. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGBTGBT, accused its Chinese rival Deepseek last year of conducting distillation attacks to improve its models. Many of the attacks were crafted to tease out the algorithms that help Gemini reason or decide how to process information, Google said. Holtquist said that as more companies design their own custom LLMs trained on potentially sensitive data, they become vulnerable to similar attacks.

Let's say your LLM has been trained on 100 years of secret thinking of the way you trade. Theoretically, you could distill some of that, he said, end quote. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com

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its sixth-generation Waymo driver uses more cost-effective parts and should be able to navigate through harsher weather conditions than previous generations. The new system will serve as the primary engine for our next era of expansion. Waymo Vice President of Engineering Satish Jayachandrin said in a statement, Waymo is offering service on its Ohio vehicles to employees and their guests in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles first, before gradually expanding to new cities with a goal to open to public writers later this year. Waymo's decision to use Chinese electric vehicles in its U.S. fleet has raised GOP lawmakers' concerns. We're locked in a race with China, but it seems like you're getting in bed with China.

Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio said to Waymo's safety chief at a committee hearing last week, spokesperson Sandy Carp told CMBC that Waymo will not provide, quote, any access to its closely held autonomous driving technology, sensor data, nor any writer information to Zeker. The Chinese automaker, a subsidiary of Gile, is responsible for providing base vehicles and Waymo installs its autonomous driving technology in the cars in the U.S. The company's six-generation systems will also work with robot taxis built on the Hyundai Iconic 5 line. Waymo's current Jaguar I-Pace vehicles will continue to run on its fifth-general. generation systems. We have consistently operated mixed fleets for years, including when we transition from the 4th-gen driver on the Pacifica to the 5th-gen driver on the I-Pace, Karp said in an email. The Ohai is a boxier ride with a lower step and a higher ceiling than Waymo's existing robot taxis,

but has about the same footprint as the Jaguar Ipace, end quote. Finally today, another day, another essay about AI to summarize for you. In his essay titled The AI Vampire, Steve Yeagie, offered. a sobering critique of how he says artificial intelligence is reshaping the software engineering landscape. While Yegi has long been a vocal proponent of AI productivity, often touting 10x gains through vibe coding and advanced agents, this piece serves as a pivot toward the human and economic costs of that acceleration. He argues that AI has become a vampire that is systematically draining the life and value out of the developer community. The core of Yegi's argument

centers on who actually benefits from AI-driven productivity. He presents, two extreme scenarios to illustrate what he calls a value capture problem. Scenario A, you use AI to work at 10x productivity for a full eight-hour day. Your employer captures 100% of this extra value. You receive the same salary, but you are now doing the work of 10 people. This leads to immediate burnout and sets an unsustainable new baseline for the entire industry. Scenario B, you use AI to complete your daily task in just one hour, spending the rest of your time resting or pursuing personal interest,

While you capture 100% of the value, which is your time, your company becomes uncompetitive and eventually goes out of business because other firms are forcing their employees into scenario A. Yegi posits that we are currently stuck in scenario A. Companies functioning as capitalistic extraction machines, in his words, naturally lean into AI to squeeze every drop of productivity from their workforce. The result is a fracking of human intelligence, injecting AI into the workflow to extract value until the engineer is pumped out and exhausted. Yegi admits openly to his own so-called addiction to these tools,

describing a cycle of intense high-speed coding, followed by nap attacks and massive unexplained fatigue. He suggests that the sheer volume of decisions an engineer must make when moving at 10x speed causes a level of cognitive load that the human brain isn't designed to handle. When you use an agent like Claude Opus 4.6, you aren't just typing, you are reviewing, auditing, and integrating code at a blistering pace.

This is agentic burnout. It's a new phenomenon where the physical act of coding is replaced by the much more taxing act of continuous high-stakes decision-making. The essay reflects on how the world is accelerating against its will almost. Yegi notes that in the 1980s, society had time to reflect on news and events. Today, the pace of AI development and the pressure to adopt it leave no room for reflection. This creates what he calls a multi-wammy for developers. They are pressured by early adopters who control the narrative, by CEOs who are panicking to integrate AI, and by the fear of being left behind.

Yegy concludes that the current path is unsustainable. If AI truly makes us 10x more productive, the logical and humane response should be not to work 10x more, but a radical reduction in working hours. He advocates for a move toward a four-hour workday. Without a fundamental shift in how we value labor and time, Yegy warns that the AI vampire will continue to drain the industry.

We are at a crossroads where we must either fight for a new normal that prioritizes human well-being or face a future of perpetual AI-accelerated burnout, according to Yegay. I've actually been thinking all night and all day about that essay we led the show with yesterday, The Is This a COVID moment for AI advances essay? Longtime listeners will remember that for various accidental reasons, I was early to the COVID concerns. We launched the COVID Daily podcast a week before lockdowns happened. So I was thinking, what if we made this show something of an early warning system for the ideas in that essay yesterday? We're all about the cutting edge of tech news around here, right?

You all listening are the front lines of tech. So I want to make this request. If you see AI taking over your job, tell me about it, and maybe we'll talk about it on the show. I'm not saying I'll bring you on or whatever, but send me, you know, anecdotes and things like that. and then I will mention them when appropriate. I'm not necessarily talking about layoffs, because those will show up as headlines, though I guess I am talking about layoffs.

If you're at a small startup and they suddenly do something crazy, like replace the entire engineering team with AI agents. Tell me about that. But what I am talking about is the idea that was Cordy yesterday's essay. If you go into work tomorrow and see AI implemented in a way that makes you think, well, there's no more need for my job anymore. that's what I want to hear about. I want to know when that revelation comes to you if it comes at all, and I want to know about it months, weeks before the layoffs hit. Again, this might never come to pass,

but let's all band together and use the power of the mutant podcast army to collectively all get an early warning system for the tipping point when AI is truly making people redundant. If such a thing happens to you, get in touch at brianatrighthomefund.com. I can promise you anonymity and all that good stuff. want. Nothing again may come of all this, but like the COVID podcast, if the title wave of history does wash over all of us. Let's harness the hive mind of this podcast audience to know about it before everyone else does. Thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow. All pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San

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