Top stories today:
- NVIDIA loses ~$600B in market cap as Altman says plans unchanged
- DeepSeek releases Janus Pro, new open-weight image models
- Trump vows tariffs āmuch biggerā than 2.5% on semiconductors
- Alibaba launches Qwen 2.5-VL models with advanced agentic capabilities
- Trump says Microsoft eyeing TikTok bid to keep in U.S.
0. Data and calendar
All values as of 6 AM ET / 3 AM PT, other than S&P500 and NASDAQ close (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).
All times are ET.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing todayās newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. NVIDIA loses ~$600B in market cap, largest drop ever, as Altman says plans unchanged
NVIDIA was -17% yesterday, but is already +4% in the pre-market:
Dropped from #1 to #3 most valuable company, after Apple and Microsoft.
DeepSeek is explicitly sending user data to China, according to its own privacy policy.
How a focus on reinforcement learning supports DeepSeekās R1: analysis.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huangās net worth -$21B to $103.6B
Moved to the 17th spot on Forbesā richest-person list.
Sam Altman called it an āimpressive model,ā but āwe will obviously deliver much better models,ā and we ābelieve more compute is more important now than everā
Separately, Trump called DeepSeekās progress āpositiveā and said it's āwake-up callā for the U.S. industry.
āAn excellent AI advancement,ā NVIDIA said of DeepSeekās R1 model, despite its losses.
3. DeepSeek releases Janus Pro, new open-weight image models with 1B-7B parameters
Janus Pro 7B has challenged OpenAIās DALL-E 3, PixArt-alpha, Emu3-Gen, and Stability AIās Stable Diffusion XL on the GenEval and DPG-Bench benchmarks, per DeepSeek:
MIT licensed.
Relatedly, DeepSeek said it was ātemporarily limiting registrationsā due to facing ālarge-scale malicious attacksā on its services.
DeepSeek is also seen leveraging hardware, engineering, and large-scale parallelism to optimize AI speeds on the inferior H800 GPUs.
4. Trump vows tariffs āmuch biggerā than 2.5% on areas including semiconductors
