Sam Witteveen
Sam Witteveen is co-founder of Red Dragon AI, a machine learning and training firm in Singapore. He has worked with Deep Learning for 11 years and Transformers and LLM for 5+ years. He is a Google Developer Expert for Machine Learning in 2017 and works on LLMs and Autonomous Agents.
For the past three months, Google's Gemini 3 Pro has held its ground as one of the most capable frontier models available. But in the fast-moving world of AI, three months is a lifetime — and competitors have not been standing still.
The new flagship open-weight model — Qwen3.5-397B-A17B — packs 397 billion total parameters but activates only 17 billion per token. It is claiming benchmark wins against Alibaba's own previous flagship, Qwen3-Max, a model the company itself has acknowledged exceeded one trillion parameters.
The chatbot era may have just received its obituary. Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw — the open-source AI agent that took the developer world by storm over the past month, raising concerns among enterprise security teams — announced over the weekend that he is joining OpenAI to "work on bringing agents to everyone."
Joining the ranks of a growing number of smaller, powerful reasoning models is MiroThinker 1.5 from MiroMind, with just 30 billion parameters, compared to the hundreds of billions or trillions used by leading foundation large language models (LLMs).