There’s this interesting pattern emerging in the AI space that’s hard to ignore. While the big Western labs are carefully orchestrating their releases and pricing strategies, Chinese AI companies are just… releasing stuff. Like, a lot of stuff. Fast.

Take what happened in the last 24 hours: Minimax dropped their M2.5 model, and the benchmarks are genuinely impressive. We’re talking 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified, 51.3% on Multi-SWE-Bench, and 76.3% on BrowseComp. For context, these numbers are competitive with models that cost significantly more to run. Then, within hours, another model dropped. Three Sonnet 4.5-level models in less than a day. It’s bananas.

There’s something delightfully ridiculous about a major Australian bank charging its own staff $10 for a sausage sizzle. When I first heard about ANZ’s “silly sausage” incident, I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. A sausage sizzle – that quintessential Aussie institution usually reserved for Bunnings fundraisers and school fetes – being monetized at $10 a pop for employees at a corporate event? It’s almost too perfect a metaphor for modern corporate culture.

I’ve been mulling over something that’s been nagging at me for a while now, and a recent online discussion really crystallised it: Australia’s economy has essentially become a hedge fund for residential real estate, propped up by a protected banking oligopoly. Four of the top five companies on the ASX 200 are banks – CBA, Westpac, NAB, and ANZ – with BHP being the lone miner in that exclusive club. When you step back and look at it, that’s genuinely bonkers.