Silicon valley is buzzing over an unknown AI model that's free and powerful

A mysterious AI model called Ox Alpha has gained attention among developers in Silicon Valley, despite its unknown origin. The model, which debuted on OpenRouter on Thursday, is described as a 'reasoning model designed for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workloads.' It is also free to use, with OpenCode, an open-source AI coding agent, claiming it offers 'near unlimited usage' for a week. The provider of Ox Alpha is said to have the capacity to process 100 trillion tokens per day, which is about 100 times the number of tokens Visa uses in a month. Prominent tech figures, including Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, have praised the model. Some speculate that the model may be the work of a Chinese AI lab, with Wccftech suggesting Z.ai, which previously tested GLM-5 under the name 'Pony Alpha,' could be the source. However, other analysts have proposed that the model's tokenizer could be linked to Microsoft's MAI family. The speculation comes as Chinese AI labs like Zhipu, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI are increasingly challenging US rivals with models that perform well at a lower cost. Moonshot's Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model, has also drawn attention in Silicon Valley for its performance and affordability. Despite the interest, the evidence remains inconclusive.