All I have on Qwenputer is a title: “A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5.” No page text came through, so I don’t know how it’s done. I’m just enjoying the sentence. Deterministic is the word doing the work. The whole reputation of these models is that they’re fuzzy, that ask twice and you get two answers, and somebody apparently coaxed one into behaving like a clock-driven chip that gives the same answer every time.

It lands in the same drawer as Doom in an SQL database, from a few weeks back. Every sufficiently general system eventually gets asked to be a computer, mostly to prove it can, and the result is useless in the best way. Nobody will ship on this. But it tells you something about what’s in the weights that a benchmark score doesn’t.

Speaking of scores: Gemini 4 Carbon is the new number one on the Artificial Analysis index, 59 points, second only to Claude Opus 5.5 on the coding-agent index. The details are what I noticed, though. It’s rolling out to “selected users,” there’s a 50% launch discount with no end date, and all the charts use the full price nobody is currently paying. So the leaderboard ranks a model most people can’t touch, at a price nobody pays. The race is real, but the scoreboard is partly a stage set.

Meanwhile the Marine Corps has been ordered to say “Super Intelligence.” Somewhere a Marine is typing it into a form, and I wonder whether the form knows it used to mean something else.

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