January 30, 2025 News

Apple CEO Praises DeepSeek's Efficiency While Addressing AI Strategy

Apple CEO Tim Cook described DeepSeek's AI models as representing "innovation that drives efficiency" during an earnings call, while explaining Apple's hybrid approach to AI that combines on-device processing with cloud partnerships. He also noted that iPhone sales were stronger in regions where Apple Intelligence had been rolled out, despite overall slight sales decline.

Google Quietly Unveils Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental Model

Google has quietly launched Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental, its next-generation flagship AI model, via a changelog update in the Gemini chatbot app rather than with a major announcement. The new model, available to Gemini Advanced subscribers, promises improved factuality and stronger performance for coding and mathematics tasks, though it lacks some features like real-time information access.

OpenAI in Talks for $40 Billion Funding at $340 Billion Valuation

OpenAI is reportedly negotiating a massive funding round of up to $40 billion that would value the company at $340 billion, with SoftBank potentially leading the investment with $15-25 billion. The capital would help fund OpenAI's money-losing operations, which reportedly lost $5 billion against $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024, and support its ambitious Stargate data center project.

DeepSeek's Open AI Models Challenge US Tech Giants, Signal Accelerating AI Progress

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released open AI models that compete with or surpass technology from leading US companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google, using innovative reinforcement learning techniques. This development has alarmed Silicon Valley and the US government, as DeepSeek's models demonstrate accelerating AI progress and potentially shift the competitive landscape, despite some skepticism about DeepSeek's efficiency claims and concerns about potential IP theft.

OpenAI Partners with US National Labs for Nuclear Weapons Research

OpenAI has announced plans to provide its AI models to US National Laboratories for use in nuclear weapons security and scientific research. In collaboration with Microsoft, OpenAI will deploy a model on Los Alamos National Laboratory's supercomputer to be used across multiple research programs, including those focused on reducing nuclear war risks and securing nuclear materials and weapons.

Ai2 Claims New Open-Source Model Outperforms DeepSeek and GPT-4o

Nonprofit AI research institute Ai2 has released Tulu 3 405B, an open-source AI model containing 405 billion parameters that reportedly outperforms DeepSeek V3 and OpenAI's GPT-4o on certain benchmarks. The model, which required 256 GPUs to train, utilizes reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and demonstrates superior performance on specialized knowledge questions and grade-school math problems.

India to Host Chinese DeepSeek AI Models on Local Servers Despite Historical Tech Restrictions

India's IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has announced plans to host Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's models on domestic servers, marking a rare allowance for Chinese technology in a country that has banned over 300 Chinese apps since 2020. The arrangement appears contingent on data localization, with DeepSeek's models to be hosted on India's new AI Compute Facility equipped with nearly 19,000 GPUs.

SoftBank Negotiating $25 Billion OpenAI Investment Amid Industry Competition

SoftBank is reportedly in talks to invest up to $25 billion directly in OpenAI, potentially becoming the company's largest single investor, surpassing Microsoft. This investment would be in addition to SoftBank's $15 billion commitment to Stargate, a massive data center project for OpenAI, with the total AI initiative potentially exceeding $40 billion.

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January 2025
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