Top stories today:
- OpenAI claims China’s DeepSeek used its model for training
- Alibaba brings Qwen 2.5-Max to compete with DeepSeek V3
- ChatGPT Gov launched for U.S. government agencies
- ASML Q4 revenue +28% YoY, net income +31%, beating expectations
- Fed expected to hold rates steady, assess Trump’s impact on economy
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 today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. OpenAI claims China’s DeepSeek used its model for training
Some evidence of “distillation,” OpenAI said amid the growing popularity of DeepSeek in the U.S.
Tue.: White House AI czar David Sacks alleged “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek “distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI models.”
Microsoft said to be probing if DeepSeek improperly obtained OpenAI’s data.
Common practice among startups and academics to use outputs from commercial LLMs to train another model, experts said.
Separately, the U.S. Navy has banned DeepSeek over “potential security and ethical concerns.”
3. Alibaba releases Qwen 2.5-Max, new large MoE LLM competing with DeepSeek V3
Qwen 2.5-Max outperformed the open-weight DeepSeek V3 and Meta’s Llama 3.1-405B and OpenAI’s GPT-4o across benchmarks shared by Alibaba:
Trained on over 20T tokens.
Based on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which requires fewer compute resources than a traditional LLM.
Available through Alibaba Cloud’s API services.
Like other Chinese AI models, Qwen 2.5-Max has censored outputs critical of the Chinese government
Qwen Chat.
