open-source

On July 17, Xi Jinping used his first WAIC keynote to make open-source AI a matter of Chinese foreign policy — a global public good, a new cooperation body, a pitch to the Global South against Washington's gate. The Western reflex is to call it propaganda. The reflex misses what makes it work: the models are real, and they shipped the same fortnight.

On June 10 Supermemory shipped its graph engine as a local binary anyone can run for free. Reading the repo, the docs, and the benchmark fight shows the giveaway is a distribution play, not a surrender.

On May 15, X pushed 18,263 lines of Rust and Python to the public algorithm repo — a complete architectural rewrite away from the 2023 Scala stack, built around a Grok-based transformer. The code does not build, the engagement weights are still missing, and the most interesting thing in it is the model nobody is reading.

OpenClaw has 138 CVEs, a 1GB/min memory leak, and a supply-chain attack where 80% of audited skills were malicious. Hermes's flagship feature silently deleted user data on launch day. The SaaS ecosystem built on their pain has 25+ providers.

Fifteen open-source deep-research agents reduce to four architecture archetypes. Two of the four are dead ends. Here is the field guide for picking.