$100 AI Fails to Write Its Own Code
Also, Jeep Ships a Catastrophic Production Bug

The New Budget Tier: "GPT-Kindergartener"

Andrej Karpathy, former AI researcher at OpenAI and Tesla, has released a teaching repository called NanoChat; a full stack large language model implementation that purportedly costs only $100 to train. The price point is immediately the main feature; a clear sign that the industry now segments its AIs like office coffee machines: you have the premium machine that works well, and then you have this thing you pay for with change you found in the couch.

The model itself, built for a new course, is a 1.9 billion parameter system; about a kindergartener in terms of output quality, according to Mr. Karpathy. The irony is, of course, delicious. When questioned about the amount of code written by modern AI assistants, Mr. Karpathy stated that the NanoChat code was "basically entirely hand-written" because other, more powerful AIs were "net unhelpful" for the project. Apparently, the multi-billion dollar models that are supposed to usher in the future of programming are only useful for writing to do lists; everything else is "too far off the data distribution." It seems the $100 model is so unique that not even its trillion dollar cousins could understand it.

Friday Production Push Bricks Hardware; Now It's Cars

We have reached peak software. Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, pushed an Over The Air telematics update for the Uconnect infotainment system over the weekend; a classic Friday deployment that immediately resulted in catastrophe. This buggy update managed to brick a number of Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrid SUVs, rendering them useless, and in some cases, causing them to lose all power while in motion.

This is what happens when the car’s software update pipeline is less mature than a junior developer’s first Git commit. The dealer network, completely unprepared for an over the air failure, was reportedly clueless when a sudden influx of unmoving, software-defined bricks were towed in. Jeep eventually pushed a fix and told owners to leave their cars on in a good cellular area for ten minutes, like trying to convince a cranky router to accept a firmware patch. It is nice to know that the automotive industry has fully embraced the tech world's most fundamental commandment: Never deploy code on a Friday.

The Netherlands Tries to Take Back Its Stapler

Global supply chain issues are now being settled like a tense negotiation over who gets the corner office. The Dutch government announced it is taking temporary control of the Chinese owned chipmaker Nexperia, which makes crucial components for the automotive sector. This unprecedented action involved invoking the obscure "Availability of Goods Act," an old law presumably written for rationing cheese during wartime, but now applied to silicon.

The core issue is a "geopolitical" concern over the transfer of sensitive technological knowledge to Wingtech, the Chinese parent company. Wingtech, predictably, called the Dutch intervention "excessive interference." The whole affair escalated quickly: the Dutch Enterprise Chamber even ousted Nexperia CEO Zhang Xuezheng, the Wingtech founder, placing an independent administrator in charge of the company’s voting rights. The company is now being run like a troubled software project that was forced under the temporary management of an outside consultant.

Briefs

• AI vs. Factories: The economy is pivoting away from a manufacturing boom and toward an AI gold rush. We are all relieved that the future involves more venture capital pitches and fewer physical, tangible goods.
• SQLite Online: A solo developer managed to keep SQLite Online running for 11 years and now has 11,000 daily users. This is a terrifying level of operational success for a one man project; someone should check on his vacation schedule.
• PDF Swiss Army Knife: pdfly is highlighted as a utility for managing PDF files from the command line. Congratulations to the tech community for reinventing the Adobe Acrobat Pro functionality we all paid for in 1998, but now with more pipes and fewer buttons.