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January 28, 2025, 1:40 PM
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Vlad Savov / Bloomberg:
Sam Altman says DeepSeek's R1 is an “impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price” and OpenAI “will pull up some releases”  —  OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman welcomed the debut of DeepSeek's R1 model in a post on X late on Monday.
@yishan:
The “DeepSeek moment” is like in 2004 when Google detailed using distributed algorithms to build a supercomputer, and unlike Sputnik, when Russia shared little  —  I think the Deepseek moment is not really the Sputnik moment, but more like the Google moment. If anyone was around in ~2004, you'll know what I mean, but more on that later. I think everyone is over-rotated on this because Deepseek came out of China. Let me try to un-rotate
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Nvidia calls DeepSeek's work “an excellent AI advancement”, reiterating “inference requires significant numbers of Nvidia GPUs and high-performance networking”
Financial Times:
SemiAnalysis: DeepSeek spent “well over $500M on GPUs”; TechInsights says DeepSeek isn't “a big hit to Nvidia” but “a bigger problem for companies like OpenAI”  —  Short sellers profit as US chipmaker loses nearly $600bn in market value on Monday
Hayden Field / CNBC:
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov, built for US government use, and says 90K+ government employees have generated 18M+ prompts within ChatGPT since the start of 2024  —  OpenAI on Tuesday announced its biggest product launch since its enterprise rollout.  It's called ChatGPT Gov and was built specifically for U.S. government use.
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
DeepSeek challenges the “bigger is better” narrative driving the AI arms race in recent years and suggests that we may see more investment into smaller startups  —  A new A.I. model, released by a scrappy Chinese upstart, has rocked Silicon Valley and upended several fundamental assumptions about A.I. progress.
Wired:
DeepSeek's privacy policy shows broad data collection and says content that users give to its models, like text, audio, and files, is stored on servers in China
Bloomberg:
DeepSeek highlights some of China's key advantages: a deep pool of skilled software engineers, a vast domestic market, and government support via subsidies
Hugh Son / CNBC:
X announces X Money Account, a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service with Visa as its launch partner, debuting “later this year”  —  Elon Musk's social media platform X on Tuesday announced the launch of a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments services provided by Visa.
Bloomberg:
Donald Trump vows to put tariffs on foreign chips “in the very near future” and calls DeepSeek's AI progress “a positive” and “a wake-up call” for US industries  —  President Donald Trump said he would soon impose tariffs on foreign pharmaceuticals …
Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
Google says it will change Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on Maps when “official government sources” are updated, after Trump signed an EO changing the name  —  Google said Monday it will change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” in Google Maps …
Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Google open sources PebbleOS, paving the way for new third-party hardware; Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky aims to develop a new smartwatch, without VC funding  —  Four years after launching the (then) most lucrative crowdfunding campaign in Kickstarter's history, Pebble abruptly ended.
Bloomberg:
When asked if Microsoft is in discussions to acquire TikTok US from ByteDance, Donald Trump told reporters “I would say yes”; Microsoft declined to comment  —  “I would say yes,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One when asked if Microsoft is in discussions to purchase the app.
Bloomberg:
The UK CMA provisionally finds that competition in the cloud services market isn't working for consumers; AWS and Azure each control ~40% of the UK market  —  - CMA publishes provisional views in cloud services study  — Intervention comes as UK government seeks to spur growth
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
Nvidia's stock fell 16.86% on January 27, closing at $118.58, losing nearly $600B in market cap, more than twice what any US company has lost in a single day  —  Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market cap on Monday, the biggest drop for any company on a single day in U.S. history.
Reece Rogers / Wired:
Hands-on with DeepSeek's free chatbot: the R1 model is powerful, but suffers from rampant hallucinations and lacks some ChatGPT tools like the memory feature  —  DeekSeek's chatbot with the R1 model is a stunning release from the Chinese startup.  While it's an innovation in training efficiency, hallucinations still run rampant.
Jem Aswad / Variety:
Spotify says it paid out a record $10B to the music industry in 2024, up from a then-record $9B in 2023, taking its total to nearly $60B since its 2006 founding  —  Spotify paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024 — some $1 billion more than last year, the previous record …
Marques Brownlee / Marques Brownlee on YouTube:
Hands-on with Samsung's Project Moohan headset: resembles the Apple Vision Pro, Gemini integration shines, runs Android XR with mobile and tablet apps, and more  —  The Android XR headset with Gemini has some surprisingly cool features that we'll start to see everywhere.Head to BestBuy to get the latest VR or AR tech in-...
Wall Street Journal:
A profile of DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, a math geek who in 2015 founded hedge fund High-Flyer and who some compare to quant investing pioneer Jim Simons  —  The Chinese engineer built the AI company after founding a successful hedge-fund  —  Some call him China's Sam Altman.

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From Mediagazer

Liam Scott / Columbia Journalism Review:
Q&A with Tamara Bralo, the head of journalist safety at Radio Free Asia, on Trump's cuts, the future of at-risk visa holders, jailed staffers abroad, and more

Peter White / Deadline:
Sources: WBD initiates a round of layoffs in its cable TV divisions, affecting well under 100 employees and largely impacting the Discovery side of the company

Barbara Tasch / BBC:
The BBC rejects a White House claim that it took down a Gaza story, after Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the BBC of taking “the word of Hamas”

More News

Earlier Picks

Benjamin Breen / Res Obscura:
Three case studies using GPT-4o, OpenAI o1, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for historical research show that the models are now good enough for PhD-level analysis
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
Business travel startup TravelPerk raised a $200M Series E at a $2.7B valuation and buys expense management startup Yokoy, a source says for a “nine-figure” sum
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Alibaba's Qwen team releases Qwen2.5-VL, a new series of AI models that can control PCs and phones, as well as perform a number of text and image analysis tasks
Bloomberg:
KuCoin pleads guilty to having an unlicensed money transmitting business, agreeing to ~$300M in fines and forfeitures, in a case brought by US federal attorneys
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Apple releases iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS 15.3, enabling Apple Intelligence by default on supported devices but disabling AI summaries for news apps
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