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How interest rate trends can impact business value
Falling interest rates are reshaping business valuation by affecting discount rates, cash flow and investor returns. Here’s what it means now.
Weekend News Roundup
It was an eventful long weekend for Jays news. The big one was that Alejandro Kirk fractured and dislocated his thumb on an Austin Hays foul tip late in Friday’s game. His actual prognosis won’t be known until he meets with specialists on Monday. In the best case scenario, though, it’ll be several weeks before […]
Isle of Man children inspired by insight into STEM career choices
An event to showcase Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths careers was recently held.
On plant health and embracing new plant-breeding techniques in South Africa
The major challenge currently confronting South Africa’s agriculture is the spread of foot-and-mouth disease. For many farmers across the country, the most urgent tasks are both securing sufficient vaccines and rolling them out quickly in the coming months, particularly as the beef and dairy industries continue to suffer big losses. There is also pressure on sheep, goats, and other livestock to prevent the disease from spreading. As efforts to get the country through this monumental challenge continue, I believe it is important to sharpen our focus on the broader task at hand: strengthening biosecurity. This covers both animal and plant health. In recent years, we haven’t focused much on plant health, except a few times, such as when we had a goss’s wilt scare in the maize industry, a few cases of citrus black spot, or cases of sclerotinia in sunflower seeds. But the fact that South Africa managed to control the outbreaks of these particular diseases when they occurred a few years ago was due to organized agricultural and government scientific capabilities, and, most importantly, the availability of crop protection or agrochemicals necessary to address some of them. Therefore, as the animal health division in the Department of Agriculture focuses on the pressing challenge of the day, the foot-and-mouth disease, there is an opportunity for the plant health division to assess if they have all the requirements to tackle any outbreak that may occur on fruits, vegetables or crops in future. The challenge with crop diseases is that they can spread quickly and cause much more rapid damage in the field than we typically see with livestock. Therefore, speed is everything in ensuring the appropriate controls are available. I raise this as an important area, particularly given the drastic climate variation we observe across the country. The production conditions in some areas have changed noticeably over time, which may introduce new risks. The other essential part is ensuring that South Africa has access to the best crop protection technology available in the market. Many technology developers worldwide have operations in South Africa. Therefore, the Department of Agriculture, along with the Agricultural Research Council, must continuously interact with technology developers to assess the various crop protection technologies they are releasing globally and determine their suitability and need in South Africa. This will require a proactive approach from the government, unlike the current approach, in which technology developers typically approach regulators with new technologies. The government, recognising the food security risks, must take a proactive approach to ensure that South African farmers have access to the latest crop protection technologies, thereby safeguarding the country’s food security. Beyond crop protection, we must never forget that South Africa’s agriculture is key to ensuring that the country is the most food-secure country at the national level in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa is also the only African country in the top-40 global agricultural exporters, having more than doubled since 1994 on the back of the adoption of high-yielding seed cultivars. South Africa has been the only African country to adopt a bold approach to embracing science and adopting genetically engineered seeds for grains and oilseeds in the early 2000s. Since then, we have seen crop yields improve noticeably, contributing to the gains we mentioned above. But ensuring that South Africa improves further is not a given. The key lies in South African regulators’ attitudes towards new technologies. We have to maintain a progressive approach and not give in to the politics of non-food and non-scientific voices that shout on the sidelines. Food security is national security, and the government must ensure we progress, leaning on science. Therefore, the registration of high-yielding new genomic techniques is required. South Africa cannot afford to fall behind the EU, the USA, South America, and many of its competitors in global agriculture. The Department of Agriculture’s crop science division must adopt a progress-and-science-embracing approach for the good of the country. Thanks for reading AgriView! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe Share
Politics and vulgarity are not a good mix
If you have sensed that our politicians are using more vulgarity in public discourse in the last 10 years, you are right. In the past, politicians have only occasionally used
Fayette County Annual Report Highlights Local Public Health Efforts
Article presented by McDonald’s, I’m Lovin’ It! … Fayette County Public Health (FCPH) has released its 2025 Annual Report, showcasing the department’s work to protect health, prevent disease, and promote wellness across the community. The report highlights the impact of public health services delivered throughout the year, including clinical care, environmental health, school-based services, emergency preparedness, and community outreach initiatives. In
AI That Forecasts Hurricanes Years Ahead: Inside BU Research
At Boston University, research is the driving force behind innovation that spans industries and shapes the future. BU empowers faculty and students to tackle complex global challenges, producing thousands of publications each year and fueling breakthroughs that extend far beyond campus. Learn more about the innovators whose work powers discoveries on and off campus. Boston […]
Steelers' ideal draft scenario revealed
What would be the best-case scenario for Pittsburgh in the draft?
Spokane Regional Health District to mark Public Health Week with events
Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD) is celebrating National Public Health Week from April 6-12, 2026, by highlighting the importance of coordinated public health efforts and showcasing ongoing initiatives to improve
OKC Thunder, FanDuel Sports Network will part ways after 2025-26 NBA regular season
The OKC Thunder will be looking for a new broadcast home after FanDuel Sports Network ceases operations at the end of the 2025-26 NBA regular season.
Story of the birth of ESPN will be showcased in a documentary on Monday night
ESPN is going back to the beginning when it debuts a 90-minute documentary about its creation. “Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN” will premieres at 8:30 p.m. EDT on Monday.
Pinky Cole promises to bring fresh drama to ‘Real Housewives of Atlanta' Season 17
The Slutty Vegan founder tand her 'Housewives' castmate Shamea Morton talked to the AJC about the new season, which debuts Sunday night.
The Vibe Coding Effect? Apple’s App Store Saw 84% Jump in New Apps in Quarter
For much of the last decade, the number of new apps launching in Apple’s App Store each year went into a tailspin, falling a whopping 48% between 2016 and 2024, according to data from research firm Sensor Tower. At least that was the case until last year. In 2025, the number of new apps that ...
When hospitals become corporations, what happens to patient safety?
In many medical malpractice cases, the public imagines a careless doctor making a single catastrophic mistake. In reality, serious medical errors are often the result of systemic pressures that pus…
Casual Is Out: State Department Adds First-Ever Business Formal Dress Code
The State Department added business formal dress code guidance to its policy manual for the first time, setting attire standards for diplomats and staff in official settings.
Natrona County health and food inspections (3/27/26–4/2/26)
CASPER, Wyo. — The Casper-Natrona County Health Department inspects restaurants, grocery stores, convenience stores, mobile food units, commissaries and
FULL SHOW: Inside INdiana Business 4/5/26
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Book Review: Streetwear's Conquest - Culture Captured, Politics Ignored
Concentrating on the strategies that enabled casualwear to grow worldwide, the book ignores the broader historical and political conditions that encouraged that success in the first place.
Linux Sees Fixes For Its GD-ROM Driver In 2026 For Sega Dreamcast
Seeing new Linux patches for benefiting Sega Dreamcast devices wasn't on my bingo card for 2026
San Francisco's new dating scene: AI matchmakers, cash bounties
$100,000 bounties, agentic matchmaking, and rizz keyboards: Can San Francisco's dating culture ruined by technology be saved by more of it?
Celebrity impersonation looks like good business
The impersonation industry is about more than just the man who lived at Graceland—it’s thousands of other people pretending to be celebrities for money.
Celebrity impersonation looks like good business
The impersonation industry is about more than just the man who lived at Graceland—it’s thousands of other people pretending to be celebrities for money.
COMMENTARY: Politics and vulgarity are not a good mix
If you have sensed that our politicians are using more vulgarity in public discourse in the last 10 years, you are right. In the past, politicians have only occasionally used slang or made a quick ...
Chris Cagle brings country hits to Hard Rock Tulsa May 8
TULSA – Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa will welcome the electrifying country music artist Chris Cagle at 8 p.m., Friday, May 8, at Hard Rock Live inside the casino.
New cases of a deadly bacterial disease alarm doctors
The Hib vaccine drastically cut cases of a once feared contagious disease. New cases in unvaccinated kids feed concern that Hib may have a resurgence.
Chelsea 7-0 Port Vale: What Rosenior and Tosin said
Chelsea are the first team to score seven or more goals in an FA Cup quarter-final game since Liverpool beat Birmingham City 7-0 in 2005-06. Chelsea have reached the FA Cup semi-finals for the 28th time, with only Man Utd (32) and Arsenal (30 before their game against Southampton this evening) reaching the final four of the competition on more occasions. Aged 18y 345d, Chelsea's Estevao is the youngest player to both score and assist in an FA Cup game for a Premier League side since Bukayo Saka for Arsenal against Bournemouth in January 2020 (18y 144d).
Opinion: The business case for adjusting school funding for inflation and passing Prop 9
The math is simple: You cannot run a 2026 business on a 2017 budget.
"I Will Always Cherish That Chapter Of My Life" - A Million Subs Later, One Of Retro Gaming's Most Famous YouTubers Calls It Quits
But not before releasing a bunch of documents from Nintendo's most famous legal case
This Week in Politics: Early voting starts this week in New Jersey's special congressional election | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News
The political world is paying close attention to a race to fill Governor Sherrill's vacated congressional seat.
Booming business: Miami’s secret side hustlers
Junior primary education major Georgia Palko worked at Bagel and Deli, but was looking for some extra cash. After calling her dad with a bright idea, she moved forward with her plan to sell sweet treats on Valentine's Day. With around $50 worth of strawberries, a college house kitchen and a side hustler mindset, she sold 300 strawberries to mothers and lovers.
The dirty truth about houseflies and their health risks
This is the latest installment of Pittsburgh Pests, an occasional series examining the insects and other creatures that pose health risks in our region. When...
Album Review: 6WA by BigXthaPlug & 600 Entertainment
BigXthaPlug spent eight months in Nashville making a country-rap album that debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200, put “All the Way” with Bailey Zimmerman at No. 4 on the Hot 100, got him a Rolling Stone cover, and filled arenas with Jelly Roll. And then he came back to Dallas, rounded up four of his signees, and made a gangsta-rap record with N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton on the cover. 6WA is the second group release from 600 Entertainment, named after the 600 block of Meadowridge Street in Ferris, Texas, where BigX and his people grew up. The whole thing is loaded with West Coast samples. From N.W.A.’s “8Ball,” Eazy-E’s “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s” and “Boyz-N-The-Hood,” Ice-T’s “6 in the Mornin’,” Snoop Dogg’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and more. BigX is staking his name on the lineup he built—Rosama, MurdaGang PB, Yung Hood, KevanGotBandz, KaineMusic—and claiming a lineage from 1,400 miles away while insisting Dallas is its own thing. A million dollars in cash, split and handed straight to his mother. That’s the first place BigX goes on “From the Bottom.” He’d probably still be in the streets if he didn’t have his son and daughter. He only started rapping to make life better for Carter. Couldn’t start his car back then, now people get starstruck at Starbucks, and he throws the whole field away in one sentence: “How you think we competin’? You on the same bag, I just made me some millions off country.” Goyard bags off a Nashville payday, and he wants you to know exactly how far he’s come from everybody else. “Safe to Say” does something similar but looser. It’s a straight Ice Cube “It Was a Good Day” flip, and BigX nails it. Wakes up, checks both phones, nobody’s locked up, kid accounts look good. Gets pulled over, only catches a warning. Pulls up on the squad to liquor, ladies, and haze. Rosama takes the second verse and matches him. Wakes up to his girl cleaning his cuticles, twins playing peekaboo, pays off his car, calls a cousin, sees the opps and they don’t trip. Lawyer calls, he beat his case. Rosama is the strongest voice in the 600 camp after BigX, and “Life of a Gangster” is why. Third person, riding low, blacked-out windows, snub-nose revolver. A character who chose sticking people up over selling dope. “Quick eraser like a number-two pencil.” He never breaks character, and his delivery drops lower and slower than anything he does on the group cuts, like he’s telling you something at a cookout that he probably shouldn’t. Then on “Long Live Fre$h” he’s a completely different rapper. “Short-bus diamonds, these bitches retarded,” wide-body Durango he can’t even park. That kind of range matters on a group record. MurdaGang PB’s best verse is on the title track. Feds at his door at 6 AM, cameras busted, flushing dope, ram truck putting everybody on the floor. Yung Hood on “The Hottest” just lays out four reasons to keep hustling. Who wants to be broke, women cost money, you need bail, and home has to be straight. It’s funnier and more honest than most rappers get when they’re trying to explain why they sell drugs. KevanGotBandz on “Ain’t Never Slowin’ Down” talks about his father getting caught on the dope while he’s sitting on $300K somewhere in the hills, which is a specific kind of guilt that doesn’t usually make it onto crew tapes. KaineMusic, the newest signee, takes the back half of “Who Dunnit” and introduces herself in third person—“Took flight just to show these hoes how to perform”—but it’s too short to know if she can hold a full song. The flex tracks fill the middle of the LP and mostly run together. “I Go” is Rosama and PB trading brands, guns, and food punchlines. Rosama’s “anemic, my iron tucked low in this shirt” is a slick gun bar, PB fires back with “.223 with a clip ‘bout as big as a toddler” and “I go Burger King, stay with that whopper.” Quick, funny sometimes, but it’s all shopping lists. “Dopeman” is a chant. “6ixer Party” brings Snoop Dogg, who does exactly what you’d expect Snoop Dogg to do. BigX contributes the night’s wildest overshare: “She say she brought a friend too, well, I’m tryna put sausage on her dental.” These songs move fast and don’t overstay, but three or four of them could trade verses and nobody would catch it. Midway through, The D.O.C. shows up for a spoken-word interlude. Tracy Curry. West Dallas native, former N.W.A affiliate, co-writer on a lot of the records getting sampled on this very album. He thanks BigX for the tribute and then gets direct: “This your time, this DFW time. You need to do it like we do it down here.” Leave bread crumbs so everybody behind you can eat. Keep God in your life. It’s fatherly and generous, and it does raise the question of whether 6WA follows that advice. The album borrows heavy. The cover art, the Eazy-E samples, “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted” opening with a direct “Boyz-N-The-Hood” lift, Yung Hood rapping “Flag on my left side, Crip until I die.” But the stuff that actually stays with you is Dallas. BigX talking about Pleasant Grove, Rosama calling himself a country boy, PB recounting a raid that could’ve been last Tuesday. The record smells most like itself when it smells like Ferris, Texas, and least like Compton. BigX on “The Hottest” says his father was the first person he knew who had chickens. Not the way rappers usually wave at the drug trade. He means his actual father, his actual family. On “600 Degrees,” Rosama compares his chopper’s stutter to a speech disorder, PB claims he still has the block on his back even after leaving the city. BigX closes that one saying he used to spin and smack, and now the plaques are platinum. Thirty-two minutes was right for this. Nobody overstays, Tony Coles and Rance and Charley Cooks keep the production punchy, and BigX gives his signees real room instead of crowding every song. 6WA doesn’t reinvent anything. Five rappers, good beats, short clock. Most of what they say you’ve heard before. Some of it—the million to his mother, the cuticles and peekaboo, the four reasons to hustle—you won’t forget. Solid (★★★½☆) Favorite Track(s): “Safe to Say,” “From the Bottom,” “The Hottest” Subscribe
BWC: N.Y. officers save person suffering mental health crisis from frigid river
Auburn Police Officers Edward Pickard and Lucas Drancsak spotted the person, climbed down a 10-foot wall and ran to shoreline; Pickard entered the water and helped the person to safety
Binge drinking just once a month may triple your risk of liver scarring
Many people think that occasional binge drinking is harmless if they otherwise drink in moderation, but new research suggests that assumption may be dangerously wrong. A large U.S. study found that people with metabolic dysfunction–associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), a condition affecting about one in three adults, face a much higher risk of serious liver scarring if they engage in heavy drinking even just once a month.
The brutal truth about NBA health and how it can end playoff dreams
The Wine and Gold Talk podcast breaks down why availability — not talent — determines championship runs, and the Cavs are walking a dangerous tightrope heading into the playoffs.
Julia Letlow faces more questions about past DEI comments in Louisiana Senate campaign
Can U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy raise enough questions about U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow’s conservative credentials?
How a Louisiana lawyer from the 1800s appeared in the legal fight over birthright citizenship
WASHINGTON — U.S. Supreme Court justices are considering two cases that could change long-established constitutional interpretations concerning race — and Louisiana plays an integral role in both.
Skunk near Fellows Lake is 2nd rabies case for 2026: Health department
With a second case of rabies identified this week, Springfield-Greene County Health Department advises community to be careful around wildlife.
Examining why some Americans are skeptical of medical science [column]
We all owe a debt of gratitude to Drs. Pia Fenimore and Joan Thode, Lancaster pediatricians who recently authored a series of LNP | LancasterOnline columns about childhood vaccination.
Congress gave money for global HIV work. The Trump administration isn't spending it
U.S. work combatting HIV/AIDS has saved millions of lives globally. Under the Trump administration, funding has been slow in coming and unpredictable, wreaking havoc on people trying to do the work.
Hollywood\'s narrative on UFOs and ETs reaches back many decades
Hollywood has driven how Americans envision little green men with big eyes and bigger heads. But fiction soon could be separated from — or revealed as — fact if government
Major Marvel reunion spotted on 'Daredevil: Born Again' season 3 set
'Daredevil: Born Again' season 3 will be a major Marvel reunion. Set photos spoil juicy new casting additions.
Trump threatens schools’ federal funding in new order aimed at stabilizing college sports
President Donald Trump tried to put some teeth into his latest attempt to save college sports. The threat of cutting funding to cash-starved schools that don’t comply is real, even if the stricter rules that come out of the executive order he signed Friday could take a while to figure out.
Trump threatens schools’ federal funding in new order aimed at stabilizing college sports
President Donald Trump tried to put some teeth into his latest attempt to save college sports. The threat of cutting funding to cash-starved schools that don’t comply is real, even if the stricter rules that come out of the executive order he signed Friday could take a while to figure out.
Trump signs order aimed at stabilizing college sports with threats to federal funding
The threat of cutting funding to cash-starved schools that don’t comply is real, even if the stricter rules that come out of the executive order he signed Friday could take a while to figure out.
Trump signs order aimed at stabilizing college sports with threats to federal funding
The threat of cutting funding to cash-starved schools that don’t comply is real, even if the stricter rules that come out of the executive order he signed Friday could take a while to figure out.
Oregon health officials warn measles cases could continue to rise
According to the Oregon Health Authority, the majority of those cases are due to people being unvaccinated or having an unknown vaccination status.
Oregon health officials urge vaccination for measles amid high cases
Oregon health officials report 13 measles cases so far in 2026, urging unvaccinated residents to get immunized as national cases rise.
Downtown Lancaster celebrates 1st First Friday of spring [photos]
Those in downtown Lancaster were able to celebrate spring's first First Friday event for 2026 this Friday. There were plenty of new exhibitions to check out, as well as concerts
Ramsey County mumps case prompts concern over trust in public health
Colorado Supreme Court intervenes in 4 ongoing cases
The Colorado Supreme Court recently moved to intervene in four ongoing cases, including two criminal prosecutions, a civil lawsuit, and a child welfare proceeding. At least four of the court’s seven members must agree to hear a case outside of the normal appellate process. The issues raised before the justices include the ability of prosecutors […]
A light round of direct cattle business on Friday
Direct cash cattle trade activity was relatively quiet Friday, with a few deals reported in the South. For the week, live deals in the South were at $245 to $246, $8 to $9 higher than the previous week’s weighted averages. Dressed deals in the North were at mostly $385, $13 higher than the prior week’s […]
Bob Buckhorn continues fundraising momentum; hits $1.8M banked
He's not officially a candidate yet, but he'll be rife with cash when he is.
How The PENN Entertainment (PENN) Turnaround Story Is Shifting With New Targets And ESPN Progress
PENN Entertainment's fair value estimate has shifted from US$18.44 to US$19.11 per share, putting it closer to a cluster of recent Street targets in the mid to high teens and low US$20s. This revision aligns with analyst commentary that combines optimism around the interactive segment and free cash flow with lingering doubts about management credibility and the turnaround story. Read on to see how to track these changing targets and keep up with the evolving narrative around PENN. Analyst...
Xbox's State Of Decay 3 Finally Returns, Signups Now Live For Alpha Playtests
"A mysterious broadcast calls to all survivors of the blood plague"
OpenAI isn’t just buying a podcast
OpenAI’s out-of-the-blue acquisition of TBPN, the buzzy online talk show, stunned the worlds of media and technology. But it’s a continuation of a pattern that dates back a hundred years, to 1926, when RCA created NBC in part to sell radios.
Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Having written a lot of model release blog posts, there’s something much harder about reviewing open models when they drop relative to closed models, especially in 2026. In recent years, there were so few open models, so when Llama 3 was released most people were still doing research on Llama 2 and super happy to get an update. When Qwen 3 was released, the Llama 4 fiasco had just gone down, and a whole research community was emerging to study RL on Qwen 2.5 — it was a no brainer to upgrade. Today, when an open model releases, it’s competing with Qwen 3.5, Kimi K2.5, GLM 5, MiniMax M2.5, GPT-OSS, Arcee Large, Nemotron 3, Olmo 3, and others. The space is populated, but still feels full of hidden opportunity. The potential of open models feels like a dark matter, a potential we know is huge, but few clear recipes and examples for how to unlock it are out there. Agentic AI, OpenClaw, and everything brewing in that space is going to spur mass experimentation in open models to complement the likes of Claude and Codex, not replace them. Especially with open models, the benchmarks at release are an extremely incomplete story. In some ways this is exciting, as new open models have a much higher variance and ability to surprise, but it also points at some structural reasons that make building businesses and great AI experiences around open models harder than the closed alternatives. When a new Claude Opus or GPT drops, spending a few hours with them in my agentic workflows is genuinely a good vibe test. For open models, putting them through this test is a category error. Something else to be said about open models in the era of agents is that they get out of the debate of integration, harnesses, and tools and let us see close to the ground on what exactly is the ability of just a model. Of course, we can’t test some things like search abilities without some tool, but being able to measure exactly the pace of progress of the model alone is a welcome simplification to a systematically opaque AI space. Share The list of factors I’d use to assess a new open-weight model I’m considering investing in includes: Model performance (and size) — how this model performs on benchmarks I care about and how it compares to other models of a similar size. Country of origin — some businesses care deeply about provenance, and if a model was built in China or not. Model license — if a model needs legal approval for use, uptake will be slower at mid-sized and large companies. Tooling at release — many models release with half-broken, or at least substantially slower, implementations in popular software like vLLM, Transformers, SGLANG, etc due to pushing the envelope of architectures or tools. Model fine-tunability — how easy or hard it is to modify the given model to your use-case when you actually try and use it. The core problem is that some of these are immediately available at release, e.g. general performance, license, origin, etc. but others such as tooling take day(s) to week(s) to stabilize, and others are open research questions — with no group systematically monitoring fine-tunability. In the early era of open models, the days of Llama 2 or 3 and Qwen pre v3.5, the architectures were fairly simple and the models tended to work out of the box. Some of this was due to the extremely hard work of the Llama, Qwen, Mistral, etc. developer teams. Some is due to the new models being genuinely harder to work with. When it comes to something like Qwen 3.5 or Nemotron 3, with hybrid models (either gated delta net or mamba layers), the tooling is very rough at release. Things you would expect to “just work” often don’t. I’ve been following this area closely since we released Olmo Hybrid with a similar architecture, and Qwen 3.5 is just starting to work well in the various open-source tools that need to all play nice together for RL research. That’s 1.5 months after the release date! This is just to start really investing more into understanding the behavior of the models. Of course, others started working on these models sooner by investing more engineering resources or relying on partially closed software. The fully open and distributed ecosystem takes a long time to get going on some new models. All of this is lead-in for the most important question for open models — how easy is it to adapt to specific use-cases? This is a different problem for different model sizes. Large MoE open-weight models may be used by entities like Cursor who need complex capabilities in their domain, e.g. Composer 2 trained on Kimi K2.5. Other applications can be built on much smaller models, such as Chroma’s Context-1 model for agentic search, built on GPT-OSS 20B. The question of “which models are fine-tunable” is largely background knowledge known by engineers across the industry. There should be a thriving research area here to support the open ecosystem model. The first step is to understand characteristics of different base and post-trained models to understand what they look like. The second step is to tune pretraining recipes for open models so they’re more flexible. Interconnects AI is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe For The ATOM Project and other Interconnects endeavors, we’ve put in substantial effort to measuring adoption trends in the open ecosystem. Everything takes a long time to unfold after a model is first publicly available — and adaptability is why. What we know for sure now, when Qwen has been going from strength to strength with its releases, is that technical staff across the industry has gotten comfortable working with Qwen models. Countless research methods and datasets were made to work with Qwen. It’ll take patience for any other model family to get to this point — a patience I’m not sure many open model builders have. This takes us to Gemma 4, Google’s latest open models. Gemma 3 was released more than a year ago, in March of 2025, and is a bit underrated. Gemma 4 comes in 4 sizes for now, with a bigger, MoE model of over 100B total parameters rumored but not released yet. The models we have today come in sizes of ~5B dense, 8B dense, 26B total 4B active MoE, and 31B dense. I’m most excited that they’re finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. This’ll massively boost adoption. The standard of better licenses for strong open-weight LLMs was set by mostly Chinese open model labs in the last 1-2 years, and now U.S. companies are following suit. I will personally be so happy if the horrible Llama licenses and Gemma terms of service were an ~18-month transient dynamic of the industry being nervous about releasing strong open models. The Gemma 4 scores look very solid, the small models have incredible benchmark scores (especially in general domains like LMArena) and the 31B model rivals the recent Qwen 3.5 27B, which is the leading member of that class. The ~30B size range is an important one, as it’s accessible both to researchers and to enterprises looking to deploy the model in real use-cases. Where the 7B model scale is the default for tinkering and research, a 30B model is the default for seeing if an open model can unlock substantial value in your specific workflow — a good mix of intelligence, low price, tractability for downstream training, etc. This takes us back to the above adoption criteria I mentioned for open models and the bigger question — do I think Gemma 4 will be an overwhelming success? Previous Gemma models have been plagued by tooling issues and poorer performance when being finetuned. Gemma 4’s success is going to be entirely determined by ease of use, to a point where a 5-10% swing on benchmarks wouldn’t matter at all. It’s strong enough, small enough, with the right license, and from the U.S., so many companies are going to slot it in. I’m cautiously optimistic that Gemma 4 is going to work better here. Winds are shifting for open models built in America. We saw GPT-OSS go through a bumpy launch to become an overwhelming success. There’s a collective energy around the likes of Reflection, Arcee, Nemotron, Gemma, Olmo, and peers that show substantial demand for building new stacks around open models. There’s capital to be spent on AI stacks across the economy by those who want more ownership of everything, including the model. After launching The ATOM Project 240 days ago, the conversation is shifting into the next stage. Summer of 2025 was a crisis moment where the U.S. AI scene realized it can’t wait and figure out open models after building AGI. The two markets will capture different areas and proceed in parallel. Now that more companies in the U.S. are releasing strong models, we need to improve the ecosystem so that these models are easy to use, understand, and build value around. It’s the hard work to build another inflection point in these adoption plots I’ve been updating consistently, but that’s the work to be done. Join me in it. More data coming soon! Here’s a sneak peek:
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