The US was widely considered the leader in AI, but a Chinese startup has called that dominance into question. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Hello, and welcome back to TechScape. There was a lot of news last week. To run it down in an expedient fashion:.
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Donald Trump, Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son and Larry Ellison announced a $500bn initiative to expand infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence dubbed Stargate. On its heels came a press release from Meta vowing to expand its capital expenditure to $65bn in the coming year to expand its data centers.
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Trump launched a memecoin, as did Melania, to coincide with his inauguration. OpenAI released Operator, an AI agent meant to browse the web and complete tasks for you. Early tests say it’s not quite there yet. A Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek, has released an open-sourced problem-solving model, R1, that’s wowed Silicon Valley. The model uses far less computing power and far fewer chips – therefore far less money, roughly 3-5% of the development costs for ChatGPT – to achieve the same or better results as its US counterparts.
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The model is open-source, which has allowed engineers outside of China to audit its parent company’s claims. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who is advising the Trump White House, called R1 “AI’s Sputnik moment”, a bona fide breakthrough. The global AI community widely considered the US the leader in AI, but R1 has called that dominance into question.
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