Parameter Update: 2026-23

Pretty quiet week all around, except for the Cursor stuff.

GLM 5.2

The trend of open source models being 4-6 months behind closed models continued this week, with the announcement of GLM -5.2, which comes extremely close to Opus 4.8 and really only loses to Mythos/Fable.

The only issue now is getting token cost down further, because right now it's also not a cheap model on most providers

Cursor

SpaceX acquisition

Days after the SpaceX IPO, both parties have now confirmed that the Cursor acquisition went through in a $60 Billion all-stock deal.

If all-stock acqusitions are on the table, I guess it's true that "one of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is".

Compile

Cursor actually announced a bunch of things at their inaugural Compile developer conference, but besides the fact they handed out mechanical keyboards as merch, the most important ones probably are:

1. Cursor Origin is a Github competitor build specifically for agentic (read: much heavier) workloads than Github.
2. Using all the SpaceX compute they now have access to, they are training a new base model that roughly matches Opus/GPT in size.
3. After Claude Code and Codex have both shipped mobile integrations, Cursor will now follow with a 'real' Cursor app that looks very slick.

I wonder how each of these will shift through the SpaceX deal. The model training would've been impossible otherwise, but I also wonder if they'll start being much more liberal with they're compute now that they have the resources to do so.

Midjourney Medical

It's been somewhat quiet around Midjourney for a while. After their deal with Meta last year, I had assumed they were mostly outpaced but competitors with more compute, and thus relegated to their artistic niche (which is still very cool, but certainly less mainstream). Therefore, when they teased their first-ever hardware announcement this week, I was expecting something more in line with that vision. Maybe a drawing tablet, or a camera. What I was not expecting: the world's first full-body ultrasound CT scanner?!

In one of the sickest launch videos we've seen in a minute, they announced their new division "Midjourney Medical". Their plan is extremely ambitious: Instead of competing with traditional MRIs on pure resolution, they advertise the ability to rescan frequently to check body composition changes over time. In order to make frequent scans feasible, they plan to open up a large number of health spa locations to roll out, in total, over 50,000 of these machines over the next six years.

I am not sure it their specific plan will succeed, but I wish them all the luck in the world. Having time-series information like this readily available would be extremely useful, and this might make it more accessible to many people.

Industry Gossip

G7 AI Roundtable

If you needed another indicator on the state of current AI policy, take a look at this picture of the G7 AI roundtable this week. Dario Amodei next to Arthur Mensch and Macron, Altman next to Trump on the other side of the table. Not looking good for a Fable re-release any time soon.

Meta morale problems

After the last round of layoffs, Alexandr Wang has apparently re-assigned 30%-50% of Meta's engineers into the "Agent Data Optimisation" org, which primarily does... data labeling.

This has, unsurprisingly, led to morale plummeting to historic lows, which the company has responded to by increasing the snack budget (lol).

Noam Shazeer joins OpenAI

Not too many details around this deal, but Noam Shazeer, one of the authors of the seminal "Attention is all you need" paper, who was re-hired by Google for an eye watering $2.7 Billion two years ago, has announced that he'll join OpenAI ahead of its IPO.