AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #694

1. Semis like Nvidia, AMD battle US China tariffs: Nvidia founder/CEO Jensen Huang visited Beijing to stress the importance of the China market to the company. This is in the teeth of rising US curbs on US AI chip exports to China by Nvidia, AMD and others. For Nvidia, the moves resulted in a $5.5+ billion charge against China designed H20 chips worth over $10 billion in China revenues. Nvidia is now one of the biggest US/China bargaining chips, alongside Apple on the smartphone side, in the ongoing Tariff wars. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang continues to try and thread a needle between the US and China, with personal interactions with the senior leadership in both quarters. More here and here.

   

2. OpenAI releases 03 et al models: OpenAI released “their smartest and most capable models to date”, dubbed 03 and 04-mini this week. Building on the industry race to better AI reasoning and creativity, 03 in particular for its ability to incorporate images into its reasoning processes. The OpenAI team led by Chief Research Officer Mark Chen and co-founder Greg Brockman demonstrated the new capabilities. The releases also include a new tool that helps developers use chatbots when writing code. OpenAI is also in talks to acquire AI coding startup Windsurf for about $3 billion. And OpenAi is working on an ‘X-like Social network. AI powered of course, like what they did with Ghibli images. More here and here.

   

3. US Antitrust actions against Meta & Google: Meta’s antitrust trial kicked off this week, with founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying on the company’s behalf. Meta has been in endless efforts with the FTC to end the antitrust case. Heart of the matter of course continues to be the details around the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions years ago. Separately, Google saw its second antitrust case with the DOJ not go its way on the Ad marketplace around Search. This follows its other antitrust case around Chrome and Search distribution deal with Apple and others, currently in the remedies. All these will continue to take months if not longer to resolve, while OpenAI and others advance in the AI Tech Wave. More here and here.

   

4. AI Reasoning accelerates into advanced thinking: The AI industry continues to push the envelope on AI Reasoning, with OpenAI’s most recent releases an example. The current focus is on AI ‘that can connect the dots between concepts from different fields to suggest new types of experiments’ in different verticals like healthcare, energy etc. This is the heated area of competition for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others here, vs AI companies in China. The efforts go hand in hand with experiments at higher pricing ceilings for these capabilities, important due to the variable inference intelligence compute costs involved. More here.

   

5. Quest for the ‘AI Assistant Super App’ in China & US: This week saw China’s Alibaba make progress towards its own ‘AI Assistant Super App’, with Quark, an updated quest for super-app. The idea is to develop an ‘AI Super App’, that goes beyond Tencent’s WeChat success of the last couple of decades. The quest is also being pursued in the US by Elon Musk’s X/xAI efforts with Grok, along with Meta, Google, OpenAI and others also being in the race. Apple in its own way is also in the race with the success of its iPhone ecosystem. It’s all in the early days in both countries, with the real contenders likely not surfacing for another two plus years. More here.

   

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. Anthropic’s AI software ‘glue’, the ‘Modern Context Protocol’ (MCP) gets adopted by Google, OpenAI and AI Industry. More here

   

2. Immigration driving AI Tech Wave. More here.

   

Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)