About this episode
Hey everyone, Alex here ?Welcome back to another mind-blowing week on ThursdAI! We’re diving into the first show of the second half of 2025, and let me tell you, AI is not slowing down. This week, we’ve got a massive wave of open-source models from Chinese giants like Baidu and Tencent that are shaking up the game, Meta’s jaw-dropping hiring spree with Zuck assembling an AI dream team, and Microsoft’s medical AI outperforming doctors on the toughest cases. Plus, a real-time AI game engine that had me geeking out on stream. Buckle up, folks, because we’ve got a lot to unpack!ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.We had incredible guests like Michael Luo from Agentica, dropping knowledge on RL coding agents, and Ivan Burazin from Daytona, revealing the infrastructure powering the agent era. We had an incredible episode this week, with over 8,000 views for the live show (as always, Links and Show notes in the end, and the YT live video is here for your convienience if you'd prefer watching) Open Source AI & LLMs: The Chinese Powerhouse WaveMan, if there’s one takeaway from this week, it’s that Chinese companies are absolutely dominating the open-source LLM scene. Let’s break down the heavy hitters that dropped this week and why they’ve got everyone talking.Baidu’s ERNIE 4.5: A Suite of 10 Models to Rule Them AllBaidu, a giant in the Chinese tech space, just flipped the script by open-sourcing their ERNIE 4.5 series. We’re talking 10 distinct models ranging from a whopping 424 billion parameters down to a tiny 0.3 billion. With an Apache 2.0 license, 128K context window, and multimodal capabilities handling image, video, and text input, this is a massive drop. Their biggest Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, with 47B active parameters, even outshines OpenAI’s o1 on visual knowledge tasks like DocVQA, scoring 93% compared to o1’s 81%! What’s wild to me is Baidu’s shift. They’ve been running ERNIE in production for years—think chatbots and more across their ecosystem—but they weren’t always open-source fans. Now, they’re not just joining the party, they’re hosting it. If you’re into tinkering, this is your playground—check it out on Hugging Face (HF) or dive into their technical paper (Paper).Tencent’s Hunyuan-A13B-Instruct: WizardLM Team Strikes AgainNext up, Tencent dropped Hunyuan-A13B-Instruct, and oh boy, does it have a backstory. This 80B parameter MoE model (13B active at inference) comes from the legendary WizardLM team, poached from Microsoft after a messy saga where their killer models got yanked from the internet over “safety concerns.” I remember the frustration—we were a
