VIBEGODO 1: Chinese Artificial Intelligence

The girlfriend they took away

Let’s start right away with this tear-jerking interview given to The Economist, in which a young Chinese woman says: “I couldn’t take it, I had to quit my job, because my virtual companion - I was in love, he was a friend, he was a confidant - and since they took him away from me at ByteDance, the TikTok people, my life has no meaning any more. I’m dropping everything.”

What happened? In China they’ve rolled out a series of regulations to stop people getting attached to chatbots, in order to keep the birth rate up, because this kind of technology keeps people away from real relationships. Among the most famous chatbots are Doubao and Qwen, and tens of thousands of people are protesting.

So you’ll say: “Excuse me, real women say no to me, and I can’t go with the virtual companion either. What am I supposed to do?”

And they take away your business too

But it doesn’t end there, my friend, because on top of taking away your fun, the Chinese also take away your business. Business, business.

In these very days China has gone back on the attack with open-weight AI models that you can download, however big they are. One is Kimi K3, and Qwen 3.8 is on the way. These are two giant models that are competitive with the best Western models.

On top of being open, and therefore downloadable, these models are also offered in the cloud via services like OpenRouter at ultra-competitive prices. If you go and look at the pricing you discover that Kimi K3, being on a par with - and perhaps superior to - Anthropic’s Opus, actually costs less than half. And it’s downloadable.

I can hear the tears of our American friends flowing in the background. Until recently they were all saying “no, it’s too dangerous, we’re pulling Mythos and Fable”. Now they’ve renewed Fable on all Claude Max subscriptions, and in the coming period, to stay in the game, they have two potential strategies. The first is to also let basically everyone use Fable. The second is to go for protectionism and get the American government to help them block the Chinese models.

One string does not make music

And where China is concerned, it doesn’t stop there. On the wave of this momentum, Xi announced a new international network called the World AI Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, Brazil, everyone except us - the West.

This network wants to democratize (that word again) - it wants to circulate an artificial intelligence that is free, collaborative, collectivist. Inside this network of countries, Xi has launched 5,000 scholarships to train people in artificial intelligence, and he’s also happy to indulge in some communist sentiment along the lines of “a single string does not make music, a single tree does not make a forest.”

Add to that various digs about the fact that the Americans, all the way back to Biden, hit them with an embargo to stop the Chinese buying the high-end Nvidia cards, plus the assorted bullshit they’re inventing to dominate the AI market - which they can’t manage to do. Because until recently they had the excuse that the Chinese were copying. Now that they got Fable and Mythos out there, the Chinese have still managed - because they’ve been working on it for a long time - to create competitive models, and open ones at that.

In their defence, I have to say these Chinese do sing their own praises: we do everything, five-year plan, ten-year plan, scholarships, and so on. Then you go and look at the numbers and they have trouble getting internet into schools outside the cities.

So, between one piece of bullshit and another, we have these two great contenders of artificial intelligence, and the situation is so tense that we need an immediate comment from our Pollo Watzlawick. What do you think? Well said.

Nadella and the Trojan horse

And in fact Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, perhaps taking inspiration from Nolan’s latest film, tells us that artificial intelligence is like the Trojan horse and we mustn’t trust it, because you risk paying for it twice: once because you pay to use the model, and once because they suck away all your data - since the model, to do its things, has to have access to the data.

Something doesn’t add up here, because our hero at Microsoft, and Microsoft as a whole, funded OpenAI with billions and they also own a piece of the company. So it isn’t clear why. If you go and look, they’ve launched MAI, a set of high-end Microsoft models designed specifically for enterprise work with AI and nicely integrated into Azure. What he probably means is: don’t pay twice to them, pay twice to us - with the usual bullshit about the sovereign cloud, the perimeter cloud, the secure cloud. If it’s cloud, it means it’s someone else’s computer.

Meanwhile all the big tech companies, not just Microsoft, keep laying off staff and blaming it on artificial intelligence. For more on this, let’s go over to our South America correspondent, Pedro Megusta.

Hermano, Pedro here from Mexico. This is a lie, because the American big tech, the gringos, are going to fire our hermanos - not because artificial intelligence does the work in place of the person, but because los gringos need the dinero to buy the GPU, to buy the machine, the GPU, hermano. Ay ay ay.

Thank you, Pedro.

And to close, a philosophical comment from our author, Pollo Watzlawick, with a deep question. In light of what we’ve seen, Mister Pollo Watzlawick, on this artificial intelligence, on this environment - do you think that, with the help of this technology, you will finally be able, as a rubber chicken, to acquire a true consciousness?

If you too want to acquire a true consciousness about artificial intelligence, and do things properly without being taken for a ride, actually understanding what this is about, the course to buy is Reskill. It’s designed for companies and it’s taught by yours truly.

Send this video to a friend who has been a victim of AI bullshit and tell them: don’t worry, because from today onwards there is Vibe Godo.