Mentioned in today’s edition: Mark Zuckerberg, DeepSeek, Hank Green, Myki, ACCC, ChatGPT, SpaceX and Bluesky. Plus, deals on Reolink security cameras, Apple AirPods and LG gaming monitors.

The News

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are finding out that maybe you can't just pay to win the AI wars

Meta and xAI are going through big employee purges as the tech companies struggle to keep up in the AI wars. Less than a year after spending billions on acqui-hiring AI training data company Scale AI and poaching top talent, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is set to lay off as many as 20% of its employees (Guardian). Despite this, Meta is reportedly still struggling to ship a competitive new AI model (NYT, $). Over at xAI, some of the 2-year-old company's co-founders have left (FT, $), co-founder Elon Musk has admitted its AI coding products are bad, and it has now hired two staff from Cursor, a once-popular AI-powered IDE that now faces stiff competition from Claude Code et al. 

The Sizzle: There was a period from 2024 to early 2025 when it looked like anyone could launch their own frontier AI model: Meta dropped Llama 3, xAI had Grok 2 and 3, we were getting very competitive Chinese models like DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen. Since then, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have pulled away from the rest. Both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been unable to get back into the game despite pouring crazy amounts of money into their efforts. Now, Meta is restructuring its AI organisation AGAIN (WSJ, $) and is doing weird things like buying the Openclaw "social network" Moltbook (BBC). (I should mention: Meta's AI work on its recommendation models/ad stuff seems to be going gangbusters, it's just lagging on the consumer-facing LLM stuff we associate with "AI" now). xAI's most notable accomplishment recently is corporate gymnastics as it is mashed into SpaceX.

If I had to take a guess why, I think the AI hiring spree was probably fundamentally right: top AI talent really matters. It's just that the people who really know what they're doing with AI would rather be at a top lab and not somewhere where their work is ultimately being used to get people to click on one more Instagram story or power an anime waifu. 

Also in Meta news: Meta is killing end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs soon (9to5Google)

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Australian police still haven't used the encryption backdoor powers they said they need

Police have used anti-encryption powers for a terrorism-related investigation for the first time since they were created 7 years ago (InnovationAus, $). In a report on police's use of Interception and Access powers in 24-25, the AFP issued two technical assistance requests (which are the voluntary requests to tech companies for them to help decrypt data) relating to terrorism out of 4 in total. Meanwhile, NSW Police issued 58 (!) TARs which were mostly for homicide and drugs investigations. No one used the technical assistance notices, which require companies to decrypt if they can, last year. Nor has any agency ever used the technical capability notice, which is the big kahuna that forces tech companies to build an anti-encryption backdoor.

Just remember — these were the powers that the Coalition rushed through parliament because it said it couldn’t wait for further review. So much for that, hey? 

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Did the guy "cure" his dog's cancer with AI? Not quite

A story about a Sydney-based tech guy who claims to have used ChatGPT to help create a "cure" for his dog's cancer has gone viral over the weekend (Australian, gift link). Paul Conyngham says he used AI to help him navigate the process to get his dog's DNA sequenced, "run it through data pipelines to find mutations" and then get a custom mRNA vaccine created that shrank the pet's tumours by half. 

Naturally, this has been sucked into the AI hype machine but I think the correct take was summed up by beloved YouTuber Hank Green who said that 1) there's a lot of reason to think that this might be a one-off not necessarily just attributed to a scientific breakthrough (X) 2) human cancers are a bit harder than dog cancers and, 3) all that considered, this is an accomplishment of cancer treatment and not ChatGPT.

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

How to figure out which LLMs you can run locally

I've mentioned before that I see merit in running LLMs locally. It seems like you can get a lot of benefits of LLMs, with the upsides of reduced environmental impact, complete privacy and not needing to rely on big tech.

One of the most basic questions I have about it all is also one that's surprisingly hard to find an answer to: which models run OK on my hardware? So, I've come across this website Can I Run AI locally or an even more advanced option llmfit (GitHub) which looks at your tech set up and tells you what to use. Happy noodling around! 

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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