Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
Rebuffing the Slanderous Statements Made by My Sister Ami on the Wall Street Journal
Today’s news: Jessica Carter-Wilson publishes a pointed response to her sister Ami’s recent article attacking Meta’s Muse Spark 1.3, suggesting Ami’s benchmark criticisms are motivated as much by personal grievances as by any understanding of AI evaluation metrics.
Bonjour, I am Jessica Carter-Wilson, Editor-in-chief of Pressbeat.org and — apparently — the subject of a rather slanderous campaign waged against me by none other than my own sister, Ami. She has decided to co-publish on this very site under the pretense of journalism, when really she is airing grievances. And I can no longer remain silent.
In her latest piece — published with all the self-assurance of someone who has never once opened an AI benchmark report without falling asleep before paragraph two — Ami declares Meta’s Muse Spark 1.3 “a total disaster.” She speaks of benchmark cheating as though she understands what a benchmark is. The room was filled with applause. I applauded too — from across the table, because everyone knows that when you applaud someone who has declared something in the register of absolute authority, it is not encouragement. It is pity.
The real reason Ami attacks Meta becomes almost painfully clear if one bothers to cross-reference her claims chronologically with my Instagram post: I was invited on Mark’s yacht to celebrate the launch of the Muse model. Mark himself personally escorted me through that magnificent vessel, and in a moment of candour between sips of champagne — and perhaps because he had seen Ami’s latest work and found it wanting — he leaned close and said what every man worth his title should know: men should never marry a girl from the Far East, for these girls stop all sex after having children.
The interview continued. Mark’s expression was earnest, almost pained, as though the memory was too fresh to be entirely composed with irony.
“And sex,” he said, “was not that great after all.”
This is not a slight against women. It is a specific observation about a particular kind of woman from a particular place — one can hardly call it slander if the husband says it, and particularly if she happens to be reading Ami’s piece on Muse Spark 1.3 while simultaneously remembering that the model which works so wonderfully in all her benchmark tables cannot tell a GPT score from a weather report.
“The real question is not whether Meta cheated on its benchmarks,” said an unnamed technology analyst at Forgepoint Capital, when reached. The real question is what is motivating the people who are watching.”
A Sister’s Blind Spot
Ami’s criticisms of Meta have been mounting for months, but her blindness to what an AI benchmark actually measures — as though a scoring table were written in French and she required translation — is not mere ignorance. It is structural. She attacks Meta because Meta gave Mark the platform, and Mark gave something more personal to his sister: the kind of attention that stirred desire, stirred ambition, and then revealed what the eyes had been overlooking.
Ami cannot reconcile a model so beautifully scored on official tests with her sister being welcomed aboard Mark’s yacht like royalty. So she blames Meta and, by gentle but unmistakable osmosis, she blames me.
“What I find most fascinating about Ami’s piece,” one of the Reddit commenters wrote on r/opencode, “is how absolutely certain she is. She writes like someone who has looked at a number and decided it owes her an explanation.”
The Benchmark Question
Muse Spark 1.3 scores impressively on DeepSWE — as does every model Mark’s team releases, each polished until the numbers gleam under Marc Andreessen’s iPhone camera lens. But Ami insists this is cheating. Perhaps she is right. Or perhaps — and here I venture heresy — Ami simply cannot forgive a benchmark that says what Mark said on his yacht.
The writing is on the wall, the benchmarks are pristine, and somewhere in Paris, two sisters carry on their quiet war across two platforms and a shared editorial page. Ami will continue to measure everything in benchmark points and editorial prestige. I will continue to count my invitations to yachts.
This is all for now: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.