Huawei's Ascend 910C: Navigating Trade and Tech

Our 203rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/14/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
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In this episode:

• OpenAI's new 'deep research' feature has raised concerns about cybersecurity and the potential misuse of AI models for bio-weapons and autonomous capabilities, prompting new safety and governance measures.
• Google's extensive $3 billion investment in Anthropic is revealed, aligning with their AI strategy and reinforcing the importance of multiple technology partnerships.
• Huawei's advancements in the AI chip industry are highlighted, with significant progress in producing chips comparable to Nvidia's H100, despite export control challenges.
• China's recent directive discourages AI executives from traveling to the US, reflecting heightened security concerns and potentially signaling a more adversarial stance in the AI race.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:30) News Preview
• Tools & Apps

• • (00:02:30) OpenAI launches new tools to help businesses build AI agents
  • (00:08:50) You can now test Gemini 2.0 Flash’s native image output 
  • (00:13:32) Waymo is now offering 24/7 robotaxi rides in Silicon Valley
  • (00:17:19) Moonvalley releases a video generator it claims was trained on licensed content
  • (00:21:11) Snap introduces AI Video Lenses powered by its in-house generative model
  • (00:23:37) Sudowrite Launches Muse AI Model That Can Generate Narrative-Driven Fiction

• Applications & Business

• • (00:27:48) In another chess move with Microsoft, OpenAI is pouring $12B into CoreWeave
  • (00:30:54) Huawei’s Ascend 910C Takes on NVIDIA as China’s AI Race Heats Up: More Alleged Details
  • (00:36:26) Huawei reportedly acquired two million Ascend 910 AI chips from TSMC last year through shell companies
  • (00:40:27) Inside Google’s Investment in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic
  • (00:43:26) Meta is reportedly testing in-house chips for AI training
  • (00:46:48) Elon Musk's xAI buys 1 million sq ft site for second Memphis data center
  • (00:50:02) Superintelligence startup Reflection AI launches with $130M in funding

• Projects & Open Source

• • (00:53:11) Google calls Gemma 3 the most powerful AI model you can run on one GPU
  • (00:58:18) Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model
  • (01:01:13) Reka AI Open Sourced Reka Flash 3: A 21B General-Purpose Reasoning Model that was Trained from Scratch
  • (01:04:19) Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in $200k

• Research & Advancements

• • (01:06:25) Google’s Gemini Robotics AI Model Reaches Into the Physical World
  • (01:14:33) Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
  • (01:23:29) Deep Research System Card
  • (01:29:50) Claude 3.7 Sonnet System Card

• Policy & Safety

• • (01:33:24) Detecting misbehavior in frontier reasoning models
  • (01:39:30) China tells its AI leaders to avoid US travel over security concerns, WSJ reports

• (01:43:48) Outro