China’s open-source AI champion

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

While tech giants proceed to pour billions into AI development, a Chinese startup just proved you possibly can construct an open-source powerhouse on a tiny budget.

DeepSeek’s V3 model competes with the highest models at a fraction of the fee — and the partitions between open and closed AI are crumbling faster than ever. Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI rundown:

• DeepSeek-V3 rewrites open-source AI playbook

• OpenAI reveals restructuring plans for next AI phase

• Turn your images into any style

• Stanford AI brings natural gestures to digital avatars

• 5 recent AI tools & 5 recent AI jobs

• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

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LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DEEPSEEK

🤖 DeepSeek-V3 rewrites open-source AI playbook

The Rundown: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek just released DeepSeek-V3, a brand new powerhouse language model that sets recent benchmarks within the open-source AI world with performance rivaling industry giants at a fraction of the fee.

The main points:

• V3 uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture and maintains speed and cost-effectiveness despite its massive 671B parameter size.

• The training was accomplished in only two months at an estimated $5.57M, dramatically lower than the reported $500M+ spent on models like LLaMA 3.1.

• The model shows exceptional strength in math and Chinese language tasks while matching or exceeding closed models across most benchmarks.

• V3 has been critiqued for identifying as ChatGPT in conversations, which could also be because of significant GPT-generated content utilized in its training dataset.

Why it matters: The gap between open and closed AI models has never been smaller. Chinese models proceed to prove that the U.S. chip restrictions are failing to slow progress, and V3’s benchmarks show that open-source, high-performance models are achievable without the large resources of other tech giants.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

⚒️ Constructing startups within the age of AI

The Rundown: Join Vanta for a fireplace chat with CEO Christina Cacioppo and “The Lean Startup” creator Eric Ries to realize insights on navigating product-market fit, delegation, and scaling startups within the age of AI.

The Jan. 14 session will cover:

• Key takeaways from Christina and Eric’s entrepreneurial journeys

• How the principles of “founder mode” and lean methodology intersect

• The ways AI is transforming early-stage growth and startup success

Secure your spot today.

OPENAI

🔄 OpenAI reveals restructuring plans for next AI phase

The Rundown: OpenAI officially published its plans to rework right into a public profit corporation, posting a blog detailing the corporate’s controversial shift from its nonprofit structure to enable massive funding abilities for future AI development.

The main points:

• The restructuring will convert OpenAI’s for-profit arm right into a Delaware-based PBC, with the unique nonprofit gaining ‘significant’ shares in the brand new entity.

• OpenAI said the result can be ‘certainly one of the best-resourced non-profits in history,’ enabling the pursuit of charitable goals in health care, education, and science.

• The method follows the startup’s $6.6B funding round at a $157B valuation, which reportedly hinged on the restructuring.

• Elon Musk sued OpenAI in December to forestall the move, with California nonprofit Encode also pushing for a pause in a brand new filing.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s convoluted structure has been criticized because the Nov. 2023 board drama, but as Elon and co. proceed to carry the startup’s feet to the fireplace, the restructure process seems imminent. Threading the needle between a mission-driven focus and a for-profit endeavor is about to turn out to be a fragile balancing act.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Turn your images into any style

The Rundown: Google’s recent Whisk tool permits you to create custom-stylized versions of any photo by combining subjects, scenes, and artistic styles without writing prompts.

Step-by-step:

1. Visit Google Labs and open the Whisk experiment (free to make use of).

2. Click “Start from scratch,” upload your subject and scene, and select a mode.

3. Let AI generate multiple consistent variations of your image.

4. Refine results by adding specific details through the text box.

Pro tip: Use the “+” button so as to add multiple subjects or scenes for more complex compositions.

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

🤝 Turn AI passion right into a consulting profession

The Rundown: Innovating with AI’s recent program, AI Consultancy Project, transforms AI enthusiasts into skilled consultants — tapping right into a market projected to succeed in $54.7B by 2032.

The 6-month program delivers:

• Proven frameworks for client acquisition and repair delivery

• A step-by-step path to six-figure consulting income

• Students who land their first AI client in as little as 3 days

Click here to request early access to The AI Consultancy Project.

AI RESEARCH

🎭 Stanford AI brings natural gestures to digital avatars

The Rundown: Stanford researchers just developed an AI model that allows digital avatars to provide natural, context-appropriate gestures while speaking — marking advances in making virtual characters more lifelike and expressive.

The main points:

• Training data included 1,000 hours of audiobooks and 60 hours of motion capture to grasp relationships between speech, text, and body language.

• The system can generate appropriate gestures from text or audio input while detecting emotions from motion patterns alone.

• Using a brand new pre-training approach, the AI requires less training data than past models while achieving higher performance on gesture generation benchmarks.

• The model shows particular strength in matching gestures to speech patterns, corresponding to emphasizing specific words through corresponding body movements.

Why it matters: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has said we’ll soon send avatars to meetings in our place. Having realistic motion and gestures is an important step towards crafting truly reality-bending characters. Digital avatars are about to turn out to be ubiquitous across industries, and these advances could open up an entire recent world of use cases.

NEW TOOLS & JOBS

Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ ReactAI – Create fully-functional React components in seconds with no API key required

• 🔎 Hika – AI-powered knowledge search tool that transforms exploration and simplifies complex topics into interactive sections

• 📚 Scourhead – Free, open-source AI agent that scours the net, organizes data, and delivers leads to a spreadsheet

• 🤖 SEObot – Produce useful, non-spammy AI-generated blog content with auto-linking, keyword research, image generation, and fact-checking

• 📊 Shoonya – Specialized foundation models fine-tuned for commerce use cases

Latest AI Job Opportunities

• 🤖 Meta – Software Engineering Manager – FAIR

• 🛡️ Shield AI – Product Marketing Manager Consultant

• 🚗 Waymo – Senior Program Manager, Business Operations

• 🔬 Scale AI – SEAL Research Scientist, Scalable Oversight

• 🏙️ Metropolis – Principal Software Engineer

QUICK HITS

‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton raised his odds of human extinction risk because of superintelligent AI development, revising his estimate to twenty% inside three a long time while calling for stronger government regulation of the technology.

OpenAI and Microsoft reportedly agreed on a concrete metric for achieving artificial general intelligence, with a newly revealed document from 2023 defining AGI as an AI system able to generating $100B in annual profits.

Meta unveiled a vision for AI-generated characters to turn out to be energetic social media users across its platforms, with plans to expand capabilities from profile creation to content generation and live interactions.

Chinese robotics firm Unitree demoed B2-W, a rideable robot dog able to carrying humans across difficult terrain along with acrobatic maneuvering and stability control.

Toyota’s AI-powered humanoid robot CUE6 set a brand new Guinness World Record for the longest basketball shot by a robot, sinking an 80-footer on its second try.

THAT’S A WRAP

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, and Alvaro—aka The Rundown Team