AI Breach, OS Renaissance & the Memory Question

TLDR;

Welcome back! I know it’s Easter, but this newsletter never stops because the AI industry never sleeps. This week, we have a bit of everything: a massive data breach, an open-source Renaissance featuring up to three top models that remind us open-source is very much alive, the advent of a potentially historic earnings call from Samsung, Anthropic’s weird emotions paper, OpenAI’s troubles, and more.

Enjoy!

DATA

Mercor, breached

Mercor, an AI company providing human experts to create training data to train AIs (clients include both OpenAI and Anthropic), has disclosed a security incident, saying it was tied to a supply-chain compromise of the open-source LiteLLM project, a very popular LLM wrapper (a product that lets you access several models through the same platform).

The company said it was “one of thousands” affected, had contained the incident, and had brought in third-party forensic investigators. Affectees included Amazon, Meta, Apple, top US Labs, and a long list of others.

The data breach is particularly worrying when you factor in Mercor’s key role as a data provider to AI Labs, as the breach gives others access to these very expensive human expert data for other Labs to use.

Among other data, the breach includes:

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

Naturally, many eyes are looking into China, as Chinese Labs, with much poorer access to compute, have remained closely tallying US models by applying data distillation (they use US models to generate synthetic data, which they then use to train their AIs).

Cyberattacks are something we simply need to get used to, especially considering that, according to sources, what Silicon Valley researchers are most worried about when it comes to ‘new frontier capabilities’ are precisely cybersecurity attack capabilities, as upcoming models are allegedly extremely capable of.

Nonetheless, the leaked blog post about their upcoming model, Mythos, had to say one or two things about its cybersecurity capabilities to convey that the new generation of frontier AI models will be very adept at such attacks.

CHINA

We now know why DeepSeek v4 was delayed

According to The Information, DeepSeek’s next model, V4, is expected within weeks and is being positioned as a milestone in China’s semiconductor self-sufficiency because it will run on Huawei’s latest AI chips.

Chinese firms, including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent, have reportedly placed large orders for Huawei’s upcoming Ascend 950PR so they can offer V4 through cloud services and AI products, contributing to a reported 20% price increase for the chip.

The report says DeepSeek spent recent months working with Huawei and Cambricon to adapt V4 for Chinese chips, which required reworking Nvidia-centered code and validating performance. This is seen as the primary reason the model was delayed from its original February date.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

It’s clear that the CCP wants to set DeepSeek v4 as an example of what China’s AI future looks like: zero dependence on external suppliers, even if that means delaying the most-awaited Chinese model ever by a few more weeks.

MODELS

Alibaba Drops Qwen 3.6-Plus

While we wait on…

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