Carbon, Chonk, and the self-hosting shift

Google's Gemini 4 Carbon takes the #1 spot on Artificial Analysis' consolidated index — but it's not actually available to most people yet. Meanwhile Mistral drops a fully open-weight 1-trillion-parameter model, Revolut publishes one of the most detailed self-hosting case studies I've seen from a company this size, and two serious cyber operations make the headlines.

We talk about the benchmark race without the usual hype, why self-hosting is moving from experiment to production strategy, and what the DoorDash–Instacart deal actually means for local commerce.