> even Japan dropping a credible model

if fugu/fugu ultra was good, why aren’t we hearing about how good it is? seems super slow and expensive, and everyone i’ve talked to who tried it gave up

That's at least better than the nothing we've been hearing all this time. Japan being what it is re tech, I expected them to be heavy in the space, but Fugu is the first LLM I'm seeing gain attention in the news. Although that attention is still also boosted by the timely release during the export control. It's strange.