On Wednesday, Google unveiled AI features on its new Pixel 10 that — if they work as advertised — put those on Apple’s last iPhone to shame. However, as far as US market share goes, for now Apple’s iPhone is far and away a more popular phone than Google’s Pixel. Apple made up nearly half — 49% — of all US smartphone shipments last quarter, according to data from Canalys, compared with about 3% for Google.
When DeepSeek R1 was released at the end of last year, it shook the AI world to its core.
The scrappy Chinese startup developed a competitive open-weights reasoning model that bested several state-of-the-art models from OpenAI and Google in several benchmarks.
The release caused the industry to question its bet on massive AI infrastructure over clever engineering done with constrained resources.
American startup Reflection AI thinks the West needs its own DeepSeek, and plans on being the company to build it.
On Thursday, Reflection AI announced it had raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, with Nvidia leading the fundraising round with an $800 million investment.
Reflection does not appear to have developed a frontier-scale model yet, but has built the software needed to train one. A $2 billion cash infusion will certainly help with the company’s training costs, but by comparison, DeepSeek’s R1 model was trained for only $249,000.
The release caused the industry to question its bet on massive AI infrastructure over clever engineering done with constrained resources.
American startup Reflection AI thinks the West needs its own DeepSeek, and plans on being the company to build it.
On Thursday, Reflection AI announced it had raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, with Nvidia leading the fundraising round with an $800 million investment.
Reflection does not appear to have developed a frontier-scale model yet, but has built the software needed to train one. A $2 billion cash infusion will certainly help with the company’s training costs, but by comparison, DeepSeek’s R1 model was trained for only $249,000.
In an interview on CNBC yesterday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang threw some shade at the recently announced megadeal between competitor Advanced Micro Devices and its partner, OpenAI.
The unusual deal calls for AMD to sell multiple generations of its GPUs to OpenAI, totaling 6 gigawatts of computing power, in exchange for stock warrants for OpenAI to buy about 10% of the company.
When asked about the deal, Huang said:
“Yeah, I saw the deal. It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising. Considering they were so excited about their next-generation product, I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it.”
The move diversifies part of OpenAI’s GPU supply chain away from Nvidia, which supplies the vast majority of GPUs for hyperscalers today.
When asked about the deal, Huang said:
“Yeah, I saw the deal. It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising. Considering they were so excited about their next-generation product, I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it.”
The move diversifies part of OpenAI’s GPU supply chain away from Nvidia, which supplies the vast majority of GPUs for hyperscalers today.
The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler tracked prices before and during Amazon’s recent “Prime Big Deal Days” and found the savings to be paltry: on a group of nearly 50 products he’d bought on Amazon over the past six months, he would have saved just 0.6% if he’d bought them during Amazon’s high-profile sale. And those savings, Fowler points out, don’t factor in the annual $139 Prime membership fee.
In a number of cases, some big-ticket items like TVs were actually more expensive during the e-commerce giant’s much-hyped discount days than they are normally.
Some 8% of kids ages 5-12 have interacted with AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of their parents. While that’s nowhere near the usage rates of other devices like smartphones or even voice assistants, it’s still notable for a relatively new technology — especially one that’s already had devastating consequences for young people.
