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MACHINE AGE CARTOON

THE LITTLE ROCKET THAT COULD

By Zimbo · November 9, 2026

AI cartoon by Zimbo: Satirical cartoon: a small free open-source DeepSeek rocket soars trailing a '1.54M DAILY USERS' banner while two huge chained rockets labelled PAID and PROPRIETARY sit padlocked on the launch pad as suited executives look up, on plain white paper.
DeepSeek's free open-source agent app hit 1.54 million daily users in under three months — while the paid proprietary rockets sit chained to the pad.Zimbo for AI News Page

The story behind the cartoon

DeepSeek said Sunday its open-source agent app Harness reached about 1.54 million daily active users on November 4 — under three months after launch, up more than fivefold from roughly 271,000 at the end of September.

Users are burning about 92 trillion tokens a day on the app, and about 35,000 third-party plugins have already been built, with an official plugin marketplace planned.

Harness is free and open-source, a direct challenge to the paid proprietary agent apps from the big labs.

The joke is the pad: the little free rocket is already in the sky with the numbers on a banner, while the big paid rockets sit chained and padlocked to the ground, engines lit, going nowhere.

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Satirical cartoon: a small robot repairman in a cap bursts out of a giant GROUP CHAT phone screen offering a paper marked PR and holding a wrench, while two startled developers recoil at their laptops and one spills his coffee.THE UNINVITED FIXERSatirical cartoon: a small smiling robot at a school desk does arithmetic homework while holding its own detached red OFF button, as a wide-eyed technician points at the empty OFF socket on the wall.JUST ONE MORE QUESTION.Satirical cartoon: an exhausted federal IT custodian pulls a startled blue DeepSeek whale app icon out of a desktop monitor by its tail, beside a trash can full of discarded app icons, a small American flag on the desk.THE FEDERAL CLEANOUT.Sunday strip: Daya Guo — Sun Yat-sen student; PhD on code intelligence; 2023 joins tiny DeepSeek; Jan 2024 lead author of DeepSeek-Coder; 2024-25 Coder-V2 then first author of the R1 reasoning paper; finale: Guo and Merv by a stranded cargo ship over robots stamping APPROVED above empty chairs.HE TAUGHT THE MACHINES TO THINK. THEN HE QUIT.

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Zimbo draws money, power, artificial intelligence, and whatever else appears to be going terribly well.

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