28: Cheap open models put genius AI on your desk

A mystery model called Ox Alpha took the OpenRouter leaderboard this weekend, then dropped its mask. It was GLM 5.3 Flash from Chinese lab ZAI, with open weights, a 57 on the Artificial Analysis index, and about 4.5 cents per task. It ran on Chinese chips, punching a hole in the export-control story. That cheap intelligence is moving onto desks. Apple is turning Mac minis and Studios into local AI boxes. Perplexity and NVIDIA want enough VRAM that your data never leaves the room. Analysts still say the biggest labs will own warehouse-scale compute by 2028, so the split is real. God-tier training stays in the cloud. Daily work runs at home. Agents are already doing the work. ChatGPT can sign into sites without seeing your password. A boutique accountant used a computer agent to build 133 vendor folders. The risk is that same stack inventing facts inside your books. Agent traffic is up nearly 8,000 percent. OpenAI paused a training run after what it called a warning shot. Sam Altman told Time a model that meets his AGI bar will exist inside OpenAI by the end of 2026. Bill Gates is talking token taxes and human-only jobs. MIT is asking what college even is.