AI Leadership Weekly

Top Stories

o1 killer, DeepSeek-R1, Launched
DeepSeek-R1 is a new open-source model out of China, that rivals many closed models (read: OpenAI's o1 family) at reasoning tasks.

DeepSeek claims that, in some tasks and benchmarks, R1 meets or exceeds o1, which is impressive enough for an open-source model. But, it does so at 5-10% the cost of OpenAI's API. (It's worth noting, though, the extreme cost-reduction many AI companies are pushing as of late to gain market share, so the true cost/value may be hard to quantify).

The top version of the model has 671B parameters, but also has smaller versions (down to 1.5B parameters) that can easily be run locally.

$500b Stargate Project
A new AI infrastructure venture has been announced, which promises to radically expand the US's AI abilities.

The announcement, termed the Stargate Project, is a new private company formed by OpenAI, Oracle, Softbank, and Microsoft. The venture was officially announced by President Trump, who claimed he would use various executive orders to expedite the venture. But, it’s worth noting that the project has been in development since 2022 (during the Biden administration), whose own executive orders would have helped the project, and that ten data centres have already been completed for the project.

And while they have stated an intent to invest $500B over four years, the initial commitment is currently only $100B, including construction already taking place in Texas.

Trump Repeals Biden Order Addressing AI Safety
President Trump has now revoked a 2023 executive order which aimed to limit the risks posed by AI towards public safety and national security.

The executive order had required AI companies to share safety test results with the government if the AI posed a risk to the economy or national security. The same executive order also addressed other risks, including those related to nuclear and cybersecurity.

Repealing any so-called “AI safety guardrails” had been a Republican campaign promise.

In Brief

• 60-year-old chatbot resurrected

• VLC adding AI-powered subtitle

• OpenAI trying to extend human life

Market Trends

Robots Building iPhones
Chinese firm UBTech will be supplying Foxconn with humanoid robots to work in their factories. The Walker S1 has normal human proportions (it's 5'6" tall, and 167lbs).

Robots have been a staple of factories for decades, but were more of the "single arm on a pivot" variety with very limited scope. These robots, however, can achieve broader and more varied tasks, including QA duties and parts assembly. Initially, though, they will be focussing on tasks which take a greater physical toll on humans, such as heavy living and repetitive actions.

UK AIs Developing Vaccines
The Isambard-AI supercomputer hopes to revolutionise vaccine development using AI.

The £225m supercomputer is being built in Bristol, and will be fully operational by this summer, and will make it a world-wide competitor in the super-computing space. The computer will be used to develop vaccines for diseases such as Alzheimer's, as well as find treatments for heart disease, emphysema, and various cancers.

Google’s DeepMind Developing New Drugs
Google spin-off company Isomorphic Labs is pushing forward with research into drugs designed by its AI.

The AI, DeepMind, has already helped design several drugs, and the team hopes to have them in clinical trials by the end of 2025. Drug research is a data-intensive endeavour, and the hope is that AI will be able to speed up the processing and analysis of this data to make discoveries faster.

Tools and Resources

Firecrawl
Simply enter a URL, and this web app will crawl the site and return its contents in a structured format, ready for further processing.

Needle
Search across all of your organisation’s documents.

JoggAI
Create your own avatars from a prompt which can then be used in videos.

Hit reply to let us know which of these stories you found the most important or surprising! And, if you’ve stumbled across an interesting link/tweet/news story of your own, send it our way at [email protected] It might just end up in the next issue!

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