It’s a very good time to experiment with open-source LLMs

Good morning, wonderful people, and happy Friday to you all. We have a packed issue for you, with a look at the latest in Saudi’s drive to dethrone Egypt as the regional entertainment hegemon; the rundown on the regional competition to build a domestic industry to make components for wind farms; and a look at whether Saudi companies are getting flagged for violations of Saudization hiring mandates that they haven't necessarily committed.

How we’re planning to spend our weekend: Playing with GLM 5.2, the open-source AI model from Z.ai that’s backed in part by Aramco’s Prosperity 7 venture unit. We loved Claude Fable 5 for the couple of days we had access before the Trump administration forced Anthropic to pull the model, and with the White House now asking OpenAI to stagger the release of its latest offerings so the US government can vet users? Open-weights tech is looking more interesting than ever.

Better yet: Z.ai claims that (a) setting aside Fable 5, GLM 5.2 has pretty much caught up to Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest models when it comes to coding and longer agentic workflows, and (b) that it costs a tiny fraction of what you’d pay to run the same tasks on Claude’s top Opus models. And then there’s Kimi and Deepseek, which have also narrowed the gap with the US frontier labs.

The catch, for some: All three companies based in China, and the prospect of Chinese tech making inroads into the GCC saw Washington pressure the UAE to turn its back on Beijing as a condition of having access to the latest chips and models.

With tech insiders now openly debating whether we’re looking at an AI-model price war or the frontier builders going for premium pricing (see the WSJ and the FT), there’s never been a better time to experiment a bit.

We’re also going to spend the weekend mulling whether we really need that new Mac after Apple raised its prices for Macs and iPads yesterday by 20%, citing the rising cost of RAM as data center builders snap up every stick they can find.

Also on our weekend nerd list: Diving deeper into Chinese EVs after the United States banned Polestar (the Swedish EV maker owned primarily by China’s Li Shufu) and amid news that one in 10 new cars sold in Europe last month was Chinese. –Patrick