TLDR 2025-01-27

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Many in the tech industry have been praising DeepSeek over the recent release of its reasoning model, R1. R1 seemingly matches or beats OpenAI's o1 model on certain benchmarks. It only cost $5.6 million to train, much less than the hundreds of millions of dollars it has taken leading US companies to train their models. The company achieved all this while facing US sanctions that prohibit the sale of advanced chips to Chinese companies. DeepSeek's AI assistant is now the top free app in the Apple App Store.

Oracle, Microsoft, and a group of investors are in talks to take over TikTok's global operations. The deal will allow ByteDance to keep a minority stake in TikTok while the app's algorithm, data collection, and software updates will be overseen by Oracle. Oracle's server network already provides the bulk of TikTok's backbone. President Trump earlier issued an executive order giving TikTok and others a 75-day reprieve from any enforcement action related to the US' requirement that ByteDance divest from TikTok.

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek recently released a reasoning model trained on a GPU cluster a fraction the size of any of the big western AI labs that is better than the current best reasoning models. Reasoning models are able to 'think' about questions, which results in better answers. DeepSeek used a reinforcement learning approach, as opposed to a fine-tuning approach, to train its reasoning model, which resulted in cost and quality benefits. This approach can only really train the model on coding and mathematics, but this might not matter as superintelligence in coding/mathematics might transfer to other domains - this has yet to be demonstrated in practice.

AI's continued growth may ultimately hinge on a new kind of supercomputer that spans entire countries. This will involve stitching together existing datacenters to distribute the workload. The infrastructure required to stitch datacenters together already exists, but it is tuned more for disaster recovery and high-availability than large-scale AI training. Research is already underway to improve the technology, which will help address power challenges by allowing datacenters in different regions to work as one.

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ScopeDB is a database built on top of S3 that unleashes the power of cloud elasticity and workload isolation. It achieves ten times cost-efficiency and performance improvement compared to databases built with shared-nothing architecture. ScopeDB servers use a single stateless binary, so there is no need to manage local disks, data sharding, or complex leader action. A demo playground to test out the features of ScopeDB is available.

Lab allows developers to experiment with code instantly without the overhead of creating files and folders. Users can just type 'lab' with any extension (eg. lab py) and start coding. It automatically organizes experiments with smart names in a folder and cleans them up after seven days to keep things tidy. A demo video is available.

Apple has two main internal priorities for its AI efforts this year: revamp Siri and improve its AI models. Siri is undergoing a big transformation into 'LLM Siri', which will be shipping in the spring of 2026, possibly in iOS 19.4. Apple's AI models have been criticized for regularly including errors, so there is a clear need to improve them. The company has temporarily disabled summaries in iOS 18.3 for select app categories presumably until the backing AI model can be brought up to par.

In the days leading up to the deadline for TikTok to be banned in the US, users flocked to other Chinese apps such as Xiaohongshu and Lemon8. These apps have many of the same features that made TikTok so appealing: an infinite scroll of hyper-targeted recommendations and interactions with friendly strangers. They blend entertainment and networking with sales to monetize their addictive algorithms. This strategy has been very profitable, making China the global leader in social commerce.

Learn how to build a culture of testing and help your team succeed in this livestream with Sentry and Growth Tribe. RSVP for this Tuesday.

Perplexity's proposal to merge with TikTok now allows for the US government to own up to 50% of the new company upon a future IPO.

Banks are preparing a coordinated move to sell some of the $13 billion in debt they loaned Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

This page contains the slides from Joel Hawksley's talk presented at Boulder Ruby.

DeepSeek's efficiency breakthrough suggests that the entire industry has been massively over-provisioning compute resources.

More startups shut down last year than the year before - the trend is expected to continue this year.

Despite 30 years of trying, Fintech companies have still not disrupted any of the big banks and have hardly challenged the key banking model - taking deposits and issuing loans.