Weekend Edition.

A profound gift to the world. We hope.

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“The email I always open immediately — and the one that lingers longest in my inbox — is News Items. Timely, thoughtful, and well-written, John has given the astute reader a space where real journalism thrives.” — Wayne Berman, Senior Managing Director, Blackstone.

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1. Marc Andresseen:

Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen — and as open source, a profound gift to the world. (Sources: a16z.com, x.com)

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2. Financial Times:

A small Chinese artificial intelligence lab stunned the world this week by revealing the technical recipe for its cutting-edge model, turning its reclusive leader into a national hero who has defied US attempts to stop China’s high-tech ambitions.

DeepSeek, founded by hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, released its R1 model on Monday, explaining in a detailed paper how to build a large language model on a bootstrapped budget that can automatically learn and improve itself without human supervision.

US companies including OpenAI and Google DeepMind pioneered developments in reasoning models, a relatively new field of AI research that is attempting to make models match human cognitive capabilities. In December, the San Francisco-based OpenAI released the full version of its o1 model but kept its methods secret.

DeepSeek’s R1 release sparked a frenzied debate in Silicon Valley about whether better resourced US AI companies, including Meta and Anthropic, can defend their technical edge. (Source: ft.com)

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3. The Wall Street Journal:

Specialists said DeepSeek’s technology still trails that of OpenAI and Google. But it is a close rival despite using fewer and less-advanced chips, and in some cases skipping steps that U.S. developers considered essential.

DeepSeek said training one of its latest models cost $5.6 million, compared with the $100 million to $1 billion range cited last year by Dario Amodei, chief executive of the AI developer Anthropic, as the cost of building a model.

Barrett Woodside, co-founder of the San Francisco AI hardware company Positron, said he and his colleagues have been abuzz about DeepSeek. “It’s very cool,” said Woodside, pointing to DeepSeek’s open-source models in which the software code behind the AI model is made available free.