AI's "freaks and geeks" divide

• On the other hand, a handful of new projects show AI getting much better at replicating the nuances of how humans communicate. These are AI's English majors and theater kids.

Why it matters: For now, at least, AI development is replicating the humanities vs. STEM divide that has always split college-student populations — or, in high school terms, freaks and geeks.

Zoom in: Three developing stories this week show the process at work.

Alibaba's Qwen surprise

Chinese tech giant Alibaba Thursday released a new model, called Qwen QwQ-32B, that matches the performance of DeepSeek's R1 but requires a fraction of the computing power to run.

• Like DeepSeek, the new Qwen model is open source, and both Chinese projects are reasoning models that excel at technical work.
• The Qwen release is one more sign that plenty of further progress is possible in making this kind of AI more efficient.
• Reasoning models are making the transition from "amazing new breakthrough" to "cheap and widely available commodity" in record time.

OpenAI's taste-maker

After a week of hands-on experience with OpenAI's latest and biggest model, GPT-4.5, AI experts remain a little puzzled by it, given that it costs a fortune to use yet doesn't break benchmark records.

• But one consensus has emerged among fans of GPT-4.5: The new model has "taste."
• "It appears so far that GPT-4.5 has advantages in places like verbal intelligence, contextual adaptation, detailed knowledge, and a kind of abstract writing skill. It has better taste and aesthetics," blogger Zvi Mowshowitz wrote in a roundup of GPT-4.5 assessments.
• Economist-blogger Tyler Cowen wrote, "I view it as a model that attempts to improve on the dimension of aesthetics only."
• Or, as Sam Altman put it in introducing the model, "There's a magic to it I haven't felt before."

These endorsements offer an inescapable paradox.

• Nuanced facility with language is just the kind of skill that human beings have always viewed as their own unique preserve.
• But there's no way to measure it. It's purely subjective. And what looks like a creative leap to one observer can resemble a failure to someone else.

Sesame's charmed voice

One recent buzz magnet in AI circles is Sesame's Conversational Speech Model, released last week.

• Many testers of the live demo say Sesame's AI achieves a new level of confident ease in imitating the conversational flow and subtle imperfections of an actual talking human.

This is another advance that's very difficult to quantify or benchmark but could profoundly impact how AI is integrated into society.

• It's also easy to imagine how it could release a tide of confusion, fraud and scams.

Zoom out: The idea that digital intelligence would evolve on multiple tracks mirroring the science/humanities divide has a long pedigree.

• Just think of how the original "Star Wars" split its picture of advanced robotics between the technician R2-D2 and the diplomat C3PO.

Yes, but: "Freaks and geeks" are names for schoolroom cliques and types of aptitude. But most successful people excel to a degree in both realms, and any AI that aims to match humanity will need to do the same.

What we're watching: If the AGI optimists are to make good on their "human-level AI in the next two years" predictions, model developers will have to figure out how to bring these two evolutionary paths back together.

• "Easy!" say the engineers and entrepreneurs — this problem will succumb to enough brainpower and effort.
• Not so fast! say the humanists and historians — C.P. Snow's "two cultures" divide has been with us for many decades, and it's arrogant to think that AI is the field that will finally heal it.