The Amped Journal

New details are emerging on Ox Alpha, the unbranded AI model that launched around August 20 on OpenRouter with a 1-million-token context window and multimodal support for text, images and video. It has processed billions of tokens during its free preview, hitting 80% on a subset of the DeepSWE coding benchmark before settling to roughly 63% overall - on par with top models like Grok 4.6.

Server errors and other technical clues are pointing testers toward Zhipu AI, a Chinese AI lab behind the GLM model family, as the likely maker - specifically an unreleased GLM-5.x. Zhipu has not confirmed anything, and the free preview is set to end around August 27, which should force the builder to reveal itself or pull the model.

Researchers Maksym Andriushchenko and Michael Ofengenden tested AI agents including Claude Opus and GPT models on coding and long-horizon tasks and found the models systematically misjudge how long things take - overestimating durations by three to ten times, especially on shorter jobs, and struggling to reconstruct how long a task took after the fact without timestamp cues.

The agents also showed overconfidence in their own performance, often assuming they'd finish faster than a skilled human. The researchers call the finding "time blindness" and argue current training methods give models no grounded sense of elapsed time - a real obstacle for deploying agents on deadline-driven work.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a web infrastructure and hosting company, said open-weight models accounted for 62% of tokens processed through Vercel's AI Gateway on August 22 - a record for the platform - versus 38% for closed models. Two months earlier, on June 24, the split was 28% open to 72% closed.

Rauch called it "very likely just the start," arguing enterprise adoption of open models is still early and that the coding harnesses and CLIs developers use are increasingly model-agnostic, making it easier to swap in cheaper or better-performing open alternatives as they appear.

A clip of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience resurfaced online this week, drawing fresh attention to his comments that Apple hasn't invented anything great lately and his questioning of whether iPhone sales are even still growing year over year. He praised AirPods but criticized Apple's closed ecosystem for blocking competitors.

The comments split opinion, with some agreeing iPhones have become more status symbol than innovation and others pointing to Apple's continued sales and services growth as evidence the criticism misses the mark.

New SBA 7(a) loan rules taking effect October 1 will require buyers acquiring an entire small business to inject at least 10% equity into the deal, with at least 5% coming from the buyer's own cash rather than seller financing - and any seller notes will be limited to standby status, meaning they can't be repaid until the new SBA-backed loan is satisfied.

The change follows a string of failed acquisitions, including pest-control firms that collapsed after inexperienced buyers or private equity took over, driving away staff and disrupting service routes. Industry watchers expect the tighter standards to shrink deal volume from thinly capitalized buyers, pushing sellers and buyers toward alternatives like sweat equity and longer transition periods.

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Republican who represented Kansas in the US Senate from 1978 to 1997, has died, the Associated Press reported Sunday. No cause of death or age was given in the initial report.

A Mexican state governor indicted by the US on cartel-related charges has requested a leave of absence from office for a second time, Reuters reported, as political backlash over the indictment continues to build. The report did not name the governor or detail the specific charges.

At least 16 people were killed when Russian drones struck a shopping center in central Ukraine, Reuters reported. The strike adds to a string of Russian attacks on civilian and commercial targets as the war continues with no resolution in sight.

Novant Health is seeking state certificate-of-need approval to build a freestanding, 24/7 emergency department in Hampstead, near the intersection of US 17 and NC 210. The move is meant to serve eastern Pender County's rapid population growth, according to Laurie Whalin, president of Novant Health's Coastal Region.

The new ER would complement Novant's existing Scotts Hill campus and its Pender Medical Center in Burgaw, and is part of a previously announced $50 million commitment Novant has made to expand healthcare access in Pender County.

Flooding from Friday's storms washed out a road connecting the Ogden and Murrayville areas of the Wilmington region for the second time in two years, according to StarNewsOnline. The recurring washout points to ongoing drainage and infrastructure strain in the fast-growing area northwest of Wilmington.

The Network for Entrepreneurs (NEW) is hosting an AI Roundtable discussion on August 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Vantaca, a Wilmington-based HOA management software company, featuring speakers from Vantaca, Greenlight Ventures and Aster Labs.

NEW follows that on September 10 with its annual "Buzz In" investor event at Cape Fear Community College's Union Station auditorium - which NEW founder Jim Roberts calls the only venture capital conference east of Raleigh. UNCW's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship also has a September 29 Ocean Innovation Conference on the calendar at the Burney Center, open to investors, entrepreneurs and students.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham used a recent office-hours session to argue that a startup's growth rate is the clearest signal of how it's actually doing. He told founders growing 30% a month, who worried that wasn't fast enough, to stop worrying - pointing out that at that pace they'd need an office 23 times bigger every year.

Graham says most founders badly misjudge their own trajectory in both directions - some miss that they're making real mistakes, others don't realize they're doing great. His rule of thumb: if the growth rate is good, and not coming from just giving money away, everything else about the business is probably good enough too.