Techmeme
January 28, 2025, 8:40 AM

Top News

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.
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Nvidia calls DeepSeek's work “an excellent AI advancement”, reiterating “inference requires significant numbers of Nvidia GPUs and high-performance networking”  —  Nvidia called DeepSeek's R1 model “an excellent AI advancement,” despite the Chinese startup's emergence causing …
Bloomberg:
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.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
DeepSeek debuts Janus-Pro, a family of multimodal, MIT-licensed open-source models, and says that Janus-Pro-7B beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 in GenEval and DPG-Bench  —  DeepSeek, the viral AI company, has released a new set of multimodal AI models that it claims can outperform OpenAI's DALL-E 3.
Reece Rogers / Wired:
Hayden Field / CNBC:
Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Google open sources PebbleOS, paving the way for more smartwatch hardware; Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky aims to develop a new smartwatch  —  Four years after launching the (then) most lucrative crowdfunding campaign in Kickstarter's history, Pebble abruptly ended.
Wired:
DeepSeek's privacy policy shows broad data collection practices and says user data, along with all the conversations and prompts, is stored on servers in China  —  Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it's sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country …
Kevin Roose / New York Times:
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 …
Financial Times:
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Even with DeepSeek's breakthroughs, US tech companies still benefit from their large investments to train more advanced models and meet the resulting demand  —  Programming note: Platformer will be off tomorrow as I welcome a new assistant to help you all with your various customer service and billing questions and get her up to speed.
Dan Primack / Axios:
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  —  Amazon Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s UK cloud service offerings are facing closer scrutiny in the UK as the watchdog said it had concerns over their market dominance.
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  —  Chinese AI lab DeepSeek might be getting the bulk of the tech industry's attention this week.  But one of its top domestic rivals, Alibaba, isn't sitting idly by.

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More News

Benjamin Breen / Res Obscura:
Marques Brownlee / Marques Brownlee on YouTube:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Bloomberg:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: