The Great Uncoupling: How China Just Proved It Can Build Frontier AI Without NVIDIA

The Signal

For the past two months, an anonymous model called "Owl Alpha" has been quietly dominating OpenRouter's global developer charts. No one knew who built it or what hardware it ran on. Then, this week, a food delivery company best known for getting you hot pot in 30 minutes pulled back the curtain. Meituan's LongCat-2.0 is a 1.6-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model. And here's the part that's sending shockwaves through Silicon Valley: it was trained on a 50,000-chip cluster of...