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Tencent Poaches ByteDance Researchers as China AI Race Heats Up

By Juro Osawa, Qianer Liu and Jing Yang · Dec 11, 2025 5:00am PST · 1 comment

Throughout the past couple of years, as AI fever swept China’s technology sector, one giant—Tencent—seemed to mostly be sitting on the sidelines. The company, which owns the hugely popular WeChat app, didn’t seem enthusiastic to win a fierce race in the country to develop cutting-edge AI models, competing with the likes of DeepSeek,... Throughout the past couple of years, as AI fever swept China’s technology sector, one...

Art by Mike Sullivan

The Cost of Buying AI Is Creeping Up, Boosting Microsoft and Other Sellers

By Aaron Holmes · Aug 20, 2025 6:30am PDT · 2 comments

Last year, the cost for businesses to purchase state-of-the-art artificial intelligence was plummeting. Top AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google had slashed the price of their flagship AI models by more than 90% compared to prior years, while DeepSeek and other open-source developers were releasing free yet powerful models. Google... Last year, the cost for businesses to purchase state-of-the-art artificial intelligence was...

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OpenAI’s Secret Strategy for Its Open Models

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Aug 6, 2025 7:00am PDT

AI developers rejoice! After months of buildup, OpenAI yesterday finally released the first open-weight large language models it’s put out since 2019, which in AI land is forever. (ChatGPT itself was released less than three years ago.) The impetus for OpenAI to launch an open-weight model goes back to China’s DeepSeek, which exploded onto... AI developers rejoice! After months of buildup, OpenAI yesterday finally released the first...

Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng. Photo via YouTube.

Chinese AI Developer Zhipu’s First Half Revenue Grew Fourfold

By Qianer Liu and Juro Osawa · Aug 1, 2025 6:00am PDT

Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng. Photo via YouTube.

Chinese AI Developer Zhipu’s First Half Revenue Grew Fourfold

By Qianer Liu and Juro Osawa · Aug 1, 2025 6:00am PDT

Chinese artificial intelligence model developer Zhipu AI, whose progress has attracted Washington’s scrutiny and caught OpenAI’s attention, increased revenue as much as fourfold in the first half of the year, the Beijing-based startup’s CEO, Zhang Peng, said in an interview this week. Zhipu’s business remains relatively small—revenue last... Chinese artificial intelligence model developer Zhipu AI, whose progress has attracted Washington...

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AI Is Getting Cheaper, Right?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 30, 2025 7:00am PDT · 3 comments

The overarching narrative of the past two years has been that AI models are getting cheaper for customers. Just take a look at this chart, showing how the cost of purchasing access to a GPT-4 level AI model from OpenAI has dropped more than 85% since it was released in early 2023. And that’s without getting into the rise of cheap,... The overarching narrative of the past two years has been that AI models are getting cheaper for...

Microsoft's Satya Nadella (left) and Jay Parikh. Art by Clark Miller; Images via Getty

Satya Nadella’s New AI Battle Cry at Microsoft: Platform, Platform, Platform

By Aaron Holmes · Jun 4, 2025 6:00am PDT · 1 comment

In March, at a Microsoft all-hands meeting, one of the company’s newest executives, Jay Parikh, laid out a rough vision for Microsoft’s path forward in artificial intelligence. AI models made by OpenAI and others were quickly becoming commoditized by more efficient models from DeepSeek and Microsoft’s own research arm that performed nearly... In March, at a Microsoft all-hands meeting, one of the company’s newest executives, Jay Parikh,...

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China’s Answer to Vibe Coding

By Jing Yang · May 28, 2025 7:00am PDT

A new front has opened in the AI race between the U.S. and China. A six-month old Chinese startup has jumped into the market for coding assistants aimed at amateurs, hoping to make a global splash the way Chinese firms DeepSeek and Manus did in open-source models and AI that controls web browsers, respectively.YouWare, created by a 20-person... A new front has opened in the AI race between the U.S. and China. A six-month old Chinese startup...

Art by Mike Sullivan

Some Large Cloud Customers Slow Down AI Spending as Prices Drop

By Aaron Holmes · Mar 29, 2025 9:13am PDT · 5 comments

Art by Mike Sullivan

Some Large Cloud Customers Slow Down AI Spending as Prices Drop

By Aaron Holmes · Mar 29, 2025 9:13am PDT · 5 comments

Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks last year started adding artificial intelligence chatbots to its products to help customers get answers about their network security. The tools originally relied on state-of-the-art models from OpenAI and other firms. But Palo Alto Networks recently found that open-source models from DeepSeek, a Chinese... Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks last year started adding artificial intelligence chatbots...

Aidan Gomez. Photo by Getty

Cohere Boosts Revenue Pace to $70 Million on Overseas Growth

By Jon Victor, Natasha Mascarenhas and Sri Muppidi · Feb 24, 2025 7:00am PST

Cohere, one of the earliest venture-backed developers of artificial intelligence models, has faced plenty of headwinds in the last two years. The company has been under threat from better-funded competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic and faces competition from cheap, open-source alternatives like DeepSeek.In spite of all that, the company is... Cohere, one of the earliest venture-backed developers of artificial intelligence models, has...

Photo by Mike Sullivan via Midjourney

How Can Investors Continue Funding AI Developers?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 19, 2025 7:00am PST

One of the earliest AI Agenda newsletters in August 2023 made the bear case for large language model developers. Over the last year-and-a-half, our predictions from that day seemed to largely come true, as model makers like OpenAI moved more into applications and cheap AI releases from DeepSeek and others threatened the margins of those selling... One of the earliest AI Agenda newsletters in August 2023 made the bear case for large language...

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Photo via Getty.

Khan’s Parallel Universe; Uber Is Minting Money

By Martin Peers · Feb 5, 2025 5:00pm PST · 9 comments

Lina Khan is out of the government, but she hasn’t given up her crusade against big tech. The former Federal Trade Commission chair has written an opinion piece for The New York Times suggesting the success of China’s artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek is a sign that “there isn’t enough competition” in the tech industry. Perhaps Lina... Lina Khan is out of the government, but she hasn’t given up her crusade against big tech. The...

Art by Clark Miller

Can’t Compute It All? Introducing The Information’s Glossary of AI Jargon

By Rocket Drew · Jan 30, 2025 7:16am PST · 2 comments

Art by Clark Miller

Artificial Intelligence

Can’t Compute It All? Introducing The Information’s Glossary of AI Jargon

By Rocket Drew · Jan 30, 2025 7:16am PST · 2 comments

The only thing coming at us faster these days than advances in artificial intelligence’s capabilities is the amount of industry jargon we’re all needing to decipher. Don’t know the difference between open weights and open source? Still trying to distill the meaning of AI distillation, the process DeepSeek may have used to... The only thing coming at us faster these days than advances in artificial intelligence’s...

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Why It’s Cheap and Easy to Mimic OpenAI’s Reasoning Model

By Rocket Drew · Jan 30, 2025 7:06am PST · 1 comment

The word of the moment in artificial intelligence is distillation. Distillation is the technical term for transferring knowledge from one large language model, which acts like a teacher, to another model that acts as a student. And it’s likely one of the key ways a Chinese quant fund replicated OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model and set the... The word of the moment in artificial intelligence is distillation. Distillation is the...

Art via Clark Miller

Meta Scrambles After Chinese AI Equals Its Own, Upending Silicon Valley

By Kalley Huang and Stephanie Palazzolo · Jan 26, 2025 12:51pm PST · 8 comments

Artificial intelligence researchers at Meta Platforms have been in panic mode. In recent days, leaders of some of the company’s AI teams openly worried that new conversational AI made by a Chinese hedge fund meant Meta was falling behind in the AI race. Leaders including AI infrastructure director Mathew Oldham have told numerous colleagues they... Artificial intelligence researchers at Meta Platforms have been in panic mode. In recent days,...