OpenAI agrees with Trump

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). OpenAI describes DeepSeek as “state-subsidized” and “state-controlled,” and recommends that the U.S. government consider banning models from the outfit and similar People’s Republic of China (PRC)-supported operations.

Quick screenshot from the 15 pager:

AI competition is heating up…wait what about humans vs. AI? Did we already lose??

OK let’s keep going ↓

Here’s what you should know:

• Microsoft's new AI “Copilot for Gaming”

  The ultimate gaming sidekick that helps players get to play faster, sharpen skills with expert coaching, and enjoy a more social gaming experience.

• Sakana claims its AI-generated paper passed peer review

  The paper was generated by an improved version of the original AI Scientist, called The AI Scientist-v2. We will be sharing the full details of The AI Scientist-v2 in an upcoming release. This paper was submitted to an ICLR 2025 workshop that agreed to work with our team to conduct an experiment to double-blind review AI-generated manuscripts.

• Google launches Gemini with Personalization

  With Gemini, we’re creating a personal AI assistant — one that doesn’t just answer general questions, but understands you.

• Deep Research is now available to all users for free

  This is a serious question — what happens when genius costs $0?

• Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model

  “The model open-sourced here is a base generation model,” Sesame writes in CSM-1B’s Hugging Face and GitHub repositories. “It is capable of producing a variety of voices, but it has not been fine-tuned on any specific voice.”

• Without feedback, AI systems learn to explore

  Researchers at Princeton found an unexpected approach: They give AI agents — in this case, simulated robots — a single difficult task and no guided feedback at all. The robots not only completed the tasks but did so more quickly than robots given feedback and instruction.

• AI leading to faster, cheaper oil production, executives say

  Artificial intelligence is speeding up oil and gas drilling and prompting companies to take a second look at places they had viewed as too difficult or expensive to develop, executives detailed during the CERAWeek conference in Houston.

• Harnessing AI to model infectious disease epidemics

  Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and faculty director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and her research team are developing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning models to aid their work on increasing people’s resilience to health threats from environmental stressors and extreme weather events.

• Palantir and Databricks Announce Strategic Product Partnership to Deliver Secure and Efficient AI to Customers

  The partnership will provide an open and scalable data architecture that combines Palantir's powerful Ontology System with Databricks' processing scale and industry-leading data and AI platform.

• Alibaba’s AI model that reads emotions

  It’s called R1-Omni. But more importantly…think about how incredible it is that research teams are exploring models that exhibit any signs of “emotion”.

The numbers:

• National Grid Partners commits $100 Million to invest in AI startups advancing the future of energy

• Supabase Inc., an open source Postgres database company, is raising more than $100 million at a $2 billion valuation

Thought starters:

• AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

  The authors trained a large language model called the Habermas Machine to serve as an AI mediator that helped small UK groups find common ground while discussing divisive political issues such as Brexit, immigration, the minimum wage, climate change, and universal childcare. Compared with human mediators, AI mediators produced more palatable statements that generated wide agreement and left groups less divided. The AI’s statements were more clear, logical, and informative without alienating minority perspectives. This work carries policy implications for AI’s potential to unify deeply divided groups.

• OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving

  I think of AI as alternative intelligence – and its capacity to be ‘other’ is just what the human race needs.

• Company claims that their robot is already handling a full line cook’s role…

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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