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China's GLM five point two language model has landed, and it's generating real conversation in the AI community. With two hundred fifty points and over a hundred twenty comments on Hacker News, this release from Zhipu AI signals that the competition for frontier model dominance is genuinely global now, not just a Silicon Valley story.
That backdrop makes the next question feel especially timely. Has AI already killed how-to nonfiction? Tim Ferriss raised the uncomfortable possibility this week, and it's worth sitting with. If a reader can simply ask an AI to teach them anything on demand, the market for instructional books faces a structural challenge that no clever marketing can paper over.
And threading through both stories is a deeper tension that economist Tyler Cowen flagged on Marginal Revolution this week. Sometimes, he writes, it's genuinely hard to solve for the equilibrium. When technology shifts the rules faster than markets can adapt, predicting where things settle becomes less science and more educated guesswork.
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