Brought to you by:
Top stories today:
- TikTok denies China weighing TikTok U.S. sale to Elon Musk
- Mistral launches open weights Codestral 25.01
- White House unveils new curbs on exporting AI chips to counter China
- China steps up probes into financial sector officials
- U.S. AI startup founders sell less equity to VCs across stages
- Chinaās annual new loans -20%, first drop in 13 years
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).
No major events today.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing todayās newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. TikTok denies China weighing TikTok U.S. sale to Elon Musk
Senior Chinese officials reportedly weighed TikTok plans under Trumpās incoming admin.
āPure fiction,ā TikTok called it.
China can force the sale as the CCP holds a golden share in TikTok parent Bytedance.
Jan. 10: U.S. Supreme Court signaled support for the TikTok-banning law.
Top Workplaces awards get your company positive news coverage in the leading regional and national publications including the San Francisco Chronicle and USA TODAY.
Leaders value that the awards build trust and credibility in their brand and expand their brandās reach.
Expanding brand credibility is a priority for company leaders in 2025 for enhancing prospect and talent attraction: 95% of consumers trust businesses with a positive reputation (StatusLabs), and job seekers believe employee voices 3x more than marketing speak (LinkedIn).
*Sponsored.
3. Mistral launches open-weight Codestral 25.01 coding model to counter DeepSeek, Claude
Codestral 25.01 is #3 in the Lmarena.ai (formerly LMSYS) Copilot Arena leaderboard:
2x faster code completion than the Codestral model released in May.
Supports 80+ programming languages.
256k context length.
Fill-in-the-middle (FIM), code correction, and test generation capabilities.
Mistral says Codestral 25.01 surpassed DeepSeek Coder 33B and Codellama 70B Instruct in its internal benchmarks
Available to deploy from Continue.
Codestral 25.01ās API is also available through the Mistral website.
