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Chinese state media and social media viewed DeepSeek's success as a shot in the arm for a discouraged tech industry and a public suffering a stagnating economy (Li Yuan/New York Times)

Nearly two months after GM said it would stop funding Cruise robotaxi development, GM says it expects to save up to $1B annually thanks to the move (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Garmin smartwatch users report their devices are bricking after starting any activity that uses GPS; Garmin says it is looking into the issue (Victoria Song/The Verge)

Valencia-based Quibim, which is developing foundational AI models for medical imaging, raised a $50M Series A co-led by Asabys and Buenavista (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

The EU says upcoming sanctions on Russia aim to crack down on traders who send gaming consoles to Russia that are then often used by the army to control drones (Financial Times)

Fusion reactor startup Helion, which has a deal to supply Microsoft with electricity by 2028, raised a $425M Series F, valuing the company at $5.245B (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

X announces X Money Account, a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service with Visa as its launch partner, debuting "later this year" (Hugh Son/CNBC)

Hugging Face launches Inference Providers, which makes it easier for developers to run AI models on 3rd-party clouds; launch partners include SambaNova and Fal (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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 (Jem Aswad/Variety)

The "DeepSeek moment" is like in 2004 when Google detailed using distributed algorithms to build a supercomputer, and unlike Sputnik, when Russia shared little (@yishan)

Paris-based Alice&Bob, a cat qubit quantum architecture pioneer, raised a 100M Series B for a "fault tolerant" quantum computer, after a 27M Series A in 2022 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

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 (Hayden Field/CNBC)

A profile of DeepSeek creator Liang Wenfeng, a math geek who founded hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015 and had to apologize to investors about returns in 2021 (Wall Street Journal)

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 (Bloomberg)

AI enterprise service management startup Atomicwork raised a $25M Series A led by Khosla Ventures and Z47, a source says at a $150M valuation (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)

TechInsights: ChangXin Memory Technologies' DDR5 RAM required advanced manufacturing techniques that haven't previously been seen on the Chinese market (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

SemiAnalysis: DeepSeek has spent "well over $500M on GPUs over the history of the company"; TechInsights says it doesn't see DeepSeek as "a big hit to Nvidia" (Financial Times)

DeepSeek highlights some of China's key advantages: a deep pool of skilled software engineers, a vast domestic market, and government support via subsidies (Bloomberg)

DeepSeek challenges the "bigger is better" narrative underpinning the AI arms race in recent years and suggests we may see more investment into smaller startups (Kevin Roose/New York Times)

DeepSeek says it used Nvidia H800 chips, available in China until October 2023, to train R1, suggesting future models could be hampered by US export controls (Bloomberg)

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio says investor exuberance over AI has fuelled a "bubble" in US stocks that resembles the build-up to the dotcom bust in 1998-1999 (Financial Times)

EU appeals hearing: Google accuses the EC of making "grave errors" in its Android investigation that led to a record 4.3B fine; EU lawyers defended the case (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

SAP reports Q4 cloud revenue up 27% YoY to 4.71B, above 4.68B est., driven by AI demand, names a suite of new executives, and plans to simplify its strategy (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

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 (Benjamin Breen/Res Obscura)

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 (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

Hands-on with Samsung's Project Moohan headset: resembles Apple Vision Pro, Gemini integration shines, runs Android XR with mobile and tablet apps, and more (Marques Brownlee/Marques Brownlee on YouTube)

DeepSeek's breakthroughs are a big win for app developers with more value accruing back into the app layer as the cost of intelligence continues to drop rapidly (Aaron Levie/@levie)

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" (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

Even with DeepSeek's breakthroughs, US tech companies still benefit from their large investments to train more advanced models and meet the resulting demand (Casey Newton/Platformer)

When asked if Microsoft is in discussions to purchase TikTok, Donald Trump told reporters "I would say yes" (Bloomberg)

Hands-on with DeepSeek's chatbot: R1 model is free and powerful, but suffers from rampant hallucinations and lacks some ChatGPT tools like the memory feature (Reece Rogers/Wired)

Google says it will change Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on Maps after "official government sources" are updated, after Trump signed an EO changing the name (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)

Trump vows to impose tariffs on foreign semiconductors in the "near future", calls DeepSeek's AI progress "a positive" and "a wake-up call" for US industries (Bloomberg)

Apple restores Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance's Nuverse, to the US App Store, and removes the card game from its document listing banned ByteDance apps (Marko Zivkovic/AppleInsider)

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 (Wired)

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 (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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 (Bloomberg)

Nvidia's stock drops 16.86%, closing at $118.58, losing nearly $600B in market cap, more than twice as much as any US company has ever lost in a single day (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Nvidia calls DeepSeek's work "an excellent AI advancement", reiterating "inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking" (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

Google open sources PebbleOS, paving the way for more smartwatch hardware; Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky aims to develop a new smartwatch (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)

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 (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

Sources: some banks led by Morgan Stanley are in talks to sell up to $3B of senior secured debt tied to Twitter's buyout, boosted by a claim to a ~$6B xAI stake (Bloomberg)

Meta says Meta AI will now use account info from across Meta's apps to give personalized suggestions; users can also ask Meta AI to "remember" specific things (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

DeepSeek debuts a family of multimodal, MIT-licensed open-source models including Janus-Pro-7B, which it claims beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 in GenEval and DPG-Bench (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

DeepSeek says it's temporarily limiting new user registrations "due to large-scale malicious attacks" on its services (Hayden Field/CNBC)

DeepSeek could be an extinction-level event for venture capital firms that went all-in on foundational model companies; investors say they are not panicking (Dan Primack/Axios)

DeepSeek shows the complete lack of lock-in that any of these chatbots have, and such a powerful model coming from China may cement "AGI" as a national project (Bloomberg)

An in-depth look at DeepSeek: DeepSeekMoE and DeepSeekMLA, cheap V3 training, the US chip ban, "distillation" from other models, Nvidia impact, AGI, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Cancer research startup Manas AI, founded by Reid Hoffman and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, raised $24.6M to focus on breast and prostate cancer and lymphoma (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)

At Davos, AI leaders clashed over safety concerns and the $100B Stargate project; Demis Hassabis and Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei reiterated stark warnings (Stephen Morris/Financial Times)

How DeepSeek outpaced OpenAI at 3% of the cost: open-source approach, pure reinforcement learning, not supervised fine-tuning, and building on DeepSeek-R1-Zero (Matt Marshall/VentureBeat)

A look at the surveillance tech that could power Trump's immigration crackdown; a review of 15K+ contracts shows ICE and USCIS spent $7.8B on tech since 2020 (New York Times)

US tech stocks fell sharply pre-market over DeepSeek concerns, with NVDA down 8%+ and META and MSFT down 3%; ASML fell 9%+; Japanese chip companies also dropped (Financial Times)

DeepSeek's iOS app is now #1 on the App Store's Top Free Apps chart in the US, ahead of ChatGPT, stirring doubts in Silicon Valley about the US' AI lead (Bloomberg)

A profile of French health insurer Alan's CEO Jean Charles Samuelian-Werve, a Mistral board member who claims credit for securing most of Mistral's backers (Bloomberg)

A look at China's booming crypto market, with Chinese traders using VPNs, overseas shell companies, and peer-to-peer networks to circumvent China's crackdown (Wall Street Journal)

Court filing: Indian digital news firms, including NDTV, Network18, and Hindustan Times, join a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, first filed by ANI in 2024 (Reuters)

DeepSeek's use of commodity, disconnected hardware and open-source design is enough of a shot at AI hyper scaling that it could be "the way things will go" (Steven Sinofsky/@stevesi)

Some Japanese stocks drop amid DeepSeek anxiety; Advantest, an Nvidia supplier of testing equipment, drops 7%+; datacenter cable company Fujikura drops 9%+ (Bloomberg)

Source: Perplexity AI revises its TikTok US merger proposal, which now allows for the US government to own up to 50% of the new company upon a future IPO (Hayden Field/CNBC)

Brazil's data protection authority ruled that Tools for Humanity, cofounded by Sam Altman, must stop offering compensation for iris scans in the country (Reuters)

DeepSeek's iOS app is now #1 on the "Top Free Apps" chart in Apple's App Store in the US, just ahead of ChatGPT (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

Sources: Meta set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's tech, two focusing on how High-Flyer reduced training costs, one on what data High-Flyer may have used (The Information)

Betting data from Illinois, New Jersey, and Colorado shows how parlays are driving revenue growth for FanDuel, DraftKings, and other US sports betting companies (Wall Street Journal)

A bear case for Nvidia: competition from hardware startups, inference-heavy "reasoning" models, DeepSeek's training and inference efficiency breakthroughs, more (Jeffrey Emanuel/YouTubeTranscript ...)

A look at the growing prevalence of LLM-written posts that have been backdated and attributed to human authors on Physics Forums, which was founded in 2001 (Hall of Impossible Dreams)

Trump denies talks with Oracle about a TikTok deal, says "I have spoken to many people about TikTok" and expects a decision in the next 30 days (Reuters)

Chinese esports companies, including Tencent and Huya, face growth challenges in China, the world's biggest esports market; the industry earned ~$3.8B in 2024 (Wataru Suzuki/Nikkei Asia)

Major Chinese social media apps have mastered the "shoppertainment" experience, blending social media with shopping, that Western competitors struggle to match (Rest of World)

Sources: US State Dept.'s freeze on foreign aid applies to a bureau that uses cyber diplomacy to fight threats and pursues international norms for emerging tech (Martin Matishak/The Record)

CEO Brian Armstrong says Coinbase needs to rethink its listing process for new tokens to keep up with "~1m tokens a week being created now, and growing" (Brian Armstrong/@brian_armstrong)

Sources: DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng told Chinese Premier Li Qiang in a Jan. 20 meeting that US export controls on advanced chips to China were still a bottleneck (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)

A look at Google's plans to shape public perception and policies on AI, including building out educational programs, ahead of a global wave of AI regulation (Kenrick Cai/Reuters)

Despite assurances, advertisers worry Meta's tools may not prevent ads from appearing near offensive content as the new content moderation approach takes effect (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: the Trump admin is in talks for Oracle and a group of US investors to take over TikTok's global operations, with ByteDance retaining a minority stake (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

Siri with Apple Intelligence is a massive regression from the old Siri, which recognized its limitations and provided a list of search links to answer a query (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)

DeepSeek, which started as a deep-learning research branch of Chinese quant hedge fund High-Flyer, is now giving US AI giants a run for their money (Zeyi Yang/Wired)

After pouring tens of millions into Trump's campaign, the crypto industry has been paid back handsomely during his first week back, with EOs, rule changes, more (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

Rather than weakening China's AI capabilities, US sanctions appear to be driving startups like DeepSeek to innovate by prioritizing efficiency and collaboration (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)

Some crypto executives worry Trump's memecoin undercut the industry's credibility at the very moment crypto is seeking a prominent place in mainstream finance (New York Times)

Politics Headlines Today
[Tue-28-Jan-2025]

$360m Ogoni clean-up: Senate move to arrest HYPREP coordinator if - Blueprint

$360m Ogoni cleanup: HYPREP boss risks arrest after ignoring seven Senate summons - Tribune

$360m Ogoni Cleanup: Senate Threatens To Arrest HYPREP Coordinator For Shunning 7 Invites - Leadership

10 Best Offshore Sportsbooks (2025): Comparing the Top Offshore Sports Betting Websites - The Nation

10th Access Bank Lagos City Marathon Celebration Of Athleticism, Unity, Global Excellence - New Telegraph

119 students graduate with First Class in FUT Minna - The Nation

19.8m poor Nigerians on social register Minister - Vanguard

1stanniversary:Shettima hails Ododos transformative leadership - Blueprint

200 Gombe indigenes graduate as police constables - Punch

2024: Funke Akindele, Wunmi Toriola make highest grossing lead actresses - Blueprint

2024: Ogun Customs seizes N1.27bn contraband, 6,180 cutlasses, others - Tribune

2025 AFCON: Joseph Yobo Insists Super Eagles Will Win - New Telegraph

2025 AFCON: Super Eagles draw Tunisia, Uganda, Tanzania - The Authority

2025 UTME/DE: JAMB finalises preparations, meets CAN, education stakeholders - Blueprint

2027: Benue ALGON endorses Tinubu, Alia - The Nation

2027: Count me out of coalition against Tinubu, APC'PeterObi - Tribune

2027: More hurdles for opposition as Obi rejects coalition, PDP crisis deepens - Guardian

2027: None of our members defect to your party ' SDP tackles PDP - Tribune

2Baba and Annie divorce Saga: Annie has a familyRemmy Njoku, Iyabo Ojo, Sheyishay and others react - Guardian

3 arrested over rape, abduction of minor - The Sun

3 Enugu residents sue police over alleged illegal detentions - Vanguard

32-year-old Nigerian dies during childbirth in UK - Punch

355,726 rights violations complaints received in December NHRC - Punch

5 ways Nigeria is affected by the U.S. 90-day aid freeze - Guardian

5 Years After, Kwara ALGON Gets Executives - Leadership

5th Lake Chad Governors' Forum: Yobe Hosts Landmark Meeting For Regional Stabilisation, anDevelopment - Daily Independent

6 UniAbuja Students Win N5.4m Research Grants - Leadership

A 5-step plan to end hunger in Nigeria - Blueprint

A long, long road ahead': Gaza rebuilds from zero - BBC

A Unified Bank For Africa: iSwiss Bank Applies For A License In Guinea - Daily Independent

Abia begins judiciary reform, construction of new court buildings - The Sun

Abia Community Cries Out As Dumpsite Takes Over Farm Lands, Pollute Environment - Daily Independent

Abiodun And Changing Faces Of Road Infrastructure In Ifo - New Telegraph

Abramovich dodged millions in tax with superyachts-for-hire scheme - BBC

Abuja Airport Runway: Lingering Project With No End In Sigh - New Telegraph

Access Bank Lagos City Marathonmore than sporting event, says Olopade - The Nation

Access to affordable energy for 300m Africans by 2030 possible' Presidential aide - PM News

Acquisition of Knowledge Through ICT, Tool for Empowering Communities, Women, Says Presidents Wife - Thisday

Activist takes demilitarisation of Africa advocacy to global conference - The Nation

Activist urges Tinubu's ADC to broker peace between Ilemona, Offa - Guardian

Activist wins foundation award - The Nation

Actress Bambam cries out, gets help for suicidal mother - The Nation

Adeleke charges peace committee on Ilobu, Ifon, Erin-Osun - The Sun

Adeleke inaugurates 100-manpanel over communal clash - The Nation

Adeleke inaugurates committee to resolve land disputes in Osun - Guardian

Adeleke unveils plans for content creation studio in Osun - Punch

Adesanya looks for return to winning form at UFC Fight Night - Blueprint

Adeyanju condemns Sowore's 'unlawful' detention - Tribune

AFCON 2025: Nigeria To Battle Tunisia,Uganda,Tanzania In Group Stage - Leadership

AFCON: Ex-internationals warn Super Eagles against overconfidence - Guardian

AfDB Approves Initiative To Combat Hazardous Chemicals In 11 African Countries - Daily Independent

AfeBabalola Drops Suit against Dele Farotimi after Ooni, Others Intervention - Thisday

Afenifere asks FG to tackle insecurity with modern equipment - Punch

Afenifere to FG : Overhaul Nigeria's security architecture to stop kidnapping, banditry - Tribune

Afenifere to Tinubu: Overhaul security architecture to curb kidnappings, banditry - The Nation

Afenifere, CAN, others oppose push for Sharia in SWest - Punch

Africa loses $18b annually due to conflict - The Nation

Africa Needs More Oil Drilling, Licensing Rounds - Daily Independent

African Energy Week Drives Positive Impact in Cape Town: Employing 70 Local Vendors, with 99% of Event Work Delivered by South African Companies - APO Africa Newsroom