DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up that surprised the tech world with its powerful AI model developed on a shoestring, is supported by a bunch of "young geniuses", who are read to take on the deep-pocketed US giants, according to insiders and Chinese media reports.

On 26 December 2024, the Hangzhou-based firm released its DeepSeek V3 large language model (LLM), which was trained using fewer resources but still matched or even exceeded in certain areas the performance of AI models from its larger US competitors such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

The breakthrough is considered significant as it could offer a path for China to exceed the US in AI capabilities despite its restricted access to advanced chips and funding resources.

Behind its breakthrough is the firm's low-key founder and a nascent research team, according to an examination of authors credited on its V3 model technical report and career websites, interviews with former employees, as well as local media reports. The V3 technical report is attributed to a team of 150 Chinese researchers and engineers, in addition to a 31-strong team of data automation researchers.

The start-up was spun off in 2023 by hedge-fund manager High Flyer-Quant. The entrepreneur behind DeepSeek is High-Flyer Quant founder Liang Wenfeng, who studied AI at Zhejiang University. Liang's name is also on the technical report.

In an interview with Chinese online media outlet 36Kr in May 2023, Liang said most developers at DeepSeek were either fresh graduates, or those early in their AI career, in line with the company's preference for ability over experience in recruiting new employees. "Our core technical roles are filled with mostly fresh graduates or those with one or two years of working experience," Liang said.

Among DeepSeek's breadth of talent, Gao Huazuo and Zeng Wangding are singled out by the firm as having made "key innovations in the research of the MLA architecture".

Gao graduated from Peking University (PKU) in 2017 with a physics degree, while Zeng started studying for his master's degree from the AI Institute at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2021. Both profiles show DeepSeek's different approach to talent, as most local AI start-ups prefer to hire more experienced and established researchers or overseas-educated PhDs with a speciality in computer science.

DeepSeek's V3 model was trained in two months using around 2,000 less-powerful Nvidia H800 chips for only US$ 6 million - a "joke of a budget" according to Andrej Karpathy, a founding team member at OpenAI - thanks to a combination of new training architectures and techniques, including the so-called Multi-head Latent Attention and DeepSeekMoE.

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There are peeps trickling out of a soundproof chamber as its door opens. Female zebra finches are chattering away inside the microphone-lined box. The laboratory room sounds like a chorus of squeaky toys.

"They're probably talking about us a little bit," says McGill University postdoctoral fellow Logan James.

It's unclear right now, what they are saying, but James believes he is getting closer to deciphering their vocalizations through a partnership with the Earth Species Project.

The nonprofit laboratory has drawn some of the technology industry's wealthiest philanthropists — and they want to see more than just scientific progress. On top of breakthroughs in animal language, they expect improved interspecies understanding will foster greater appreciation for the planet in the face of climate change.

The Earth Species Project hopes to decode other creatures' communications with its pioneering artificial intelligence tools. The goal is not to build a "translator that will allow us to speak to other species," Director of Impact Jane Lawton said. However, she added, "rudimentary dictionaries" for other animals are not only possible but could help craft better conservation strategies and reconnect humanity with often forgotten ecosystems.

"We believe that by reminding people of the beauty, the sophistication, the intelligence that is resident in other species and in nature as a whole, we can start to, kind of, almost repair that relationship," Lawton said.

At McGill University, the technology generates specific calls during simulated conversations with live finches that help researchers isolate each unique noise. The computer processes calls in real time and responds with one of its own. Those recordings are then used to train the Berkeley, California-based research group’s audio language model for animal sounds.

This ad hoc collaboration is only a glimpse into what ESP says will come. By 2030, Lawton said, it expects "really interesting insights into how other animals communicate."

Artificial intelligence advancements are expediting the research. New grants totaling US$ 17 million will help hire engineers and at least double the size of the research team, which currently has roughly seven members. Over the next two years, Lawton said, the nonprofit's researchers will select species that "might actually shift something" in people's relationship with nature.

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Many are aware that we cannot do away with copper. It is an essential aspect of clean energy solutions, yet the traditional means of acquiring it produces pollution and other ecological issues.

Whether it's through electric vehicles, wind turbines, or solar panels, creating renewable energy is almost always tied to producing electricity. Producing electricity requires copper wiring and a ton of it. That means any path to a fully green future is going to be paved with copper wiring. However, a new startup called Still Bright is now offering a far greener alternative that may revolutionize copper production.

This unavoidable fact presents two significant issues. One is that it's becoming difficult for current mining practices to keep up with copper demand. In fact, some studies show that copper can't be mined fast enough to facilitate a transition to electric power.

The second issue is that copper production is not exactly an ecologically friendly practice. It produces toxic pollutants like lead and arsenic which eventually find their way into the earth. On top of that, powering the process requires a significant amount of dirty energy.

While these two problems present significant hurdles on the path to a green future, Still Bright may be able to clear them. This new startup has developed a method of copper production that's faster, cleaner, and more efficient than any other currently available.

The process, known as electrochemical reductive leaching, involves the use of vanadium, the 23rd element. According to Still Bright, sulfide ore is first soaked in liquid vanadium, separating the copper from its other elements. Then, the solution is sent through an electrolyzer to collect the pure copper.

Still Bright states that their vanadium process is capable of extracting 99 percent of copper from sulfide ore. Traditional leaching extracts something like 15-30 percent, and even the most comparably cutting-edge processes don't extract more than 80 percent.

While this development is an exciting one, it's still in the testing phase. Still Bright has tested and validated it at lab scale and plans on completing an in-house pilot project by 2026. Also, there is still a amter of cost, which has not been studied yet.

No matter how lofty the objectives are, but if the cost is higher than what the traditional method offers, then it will not be accepted universally.

Nevertheless, if Still Bright is successful, it can open the door for a greener future that will require less pollution and dirty energy to achieve.

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Google Cloud recently released its new Automotive AI Agent and has named the Mercedes-Benz CLA as the first car model to offer it later this year. The Agent will enable Mercedes’ MBUX Virtual Assistant to perform a wider array of conversational functions with the vehicle’s passengers.

The public got our first look at Mercedes’ next generation assistant a year ago, at CES 2024, though the company did not reveal which large language model underpinned its capabilities at the time.

Last 13 January, it was revealed that this new assistant differs from the existing MBUX that can activate around two dozen in-car commands and provide information sourced from ChatGPT and Bing. While the current generation assistant can be activated by stating "Hey, Mercedes," it functions more like Siri or Google Assistant than ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, offering static responses rather than conversational replies.

Google’s Agent is built atop the Gemini LLM using Vertex AI and is geared specifically to "allow automakers to create highly personalized and intuitive in-car agents that go beyond current vehicle voice control," per the company’s announcement post. The Agent supports both multimodal and multilingual inputs, as well as can provide answers to follow-up questions.

In Google’s example, the AI will be able to tell drivers if there are any Italian restaurants nearby, then offer up reviews of the establishment and even tell the driver what the most popular dish there is. The system is reportedly robust enough to handle multi-turn dialog with users and remember details from previous conversations.

The new MBUX assistant will reportedly pull "fresh and factual information" from Google Maps in near real time to offer "comprehensive and personalized information" about more than 250 million points of interest worldwide and current traffic conditions.

"At Mercedes-Benz, we seek to offer our customers an exceptional digital experience," said Ola Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, in a press statement. "Our partnership with Google Cloud will further enhance in-car navigation, combining sophisticated location data with generative AI."

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A Shenzhen-based robotics company, whose new humanoid robot model has drawn praise from an Nvidia scientist, has expressed its hope that a lower price will help it win in the intense industry competition in China, where firms face monetisation challenges.

A video of a humanoid robot made by Chinese start-up Engine AI has been circulating online after Jim Fan, a senior research scientist at US chip giant Nvidia, posted it on the social media platform X, asking, "Is this real?"

Fan, who also leads Nvidia's AI Agents Initiative, said he had seen posts of "very natural humanoid walking gaits" from the Chinese company, but added that it was hard to tell if the new clip was generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

"Walking gait's got swag but we need these robots to go firefighting [as soon as possible]," Fan wrote after confirming the authenticity of the video.

Engine AI originally posted the video a few days ago on Chinese social media platforms, showing the robot, called SE01, walking at a commercial complex and attracting onlookers.

The Shenzhen-based firm announced SE01 last October, positioning it as an industrial and home robot. Standing at 170cm tall, the robot can perform human movements including squats, push-ups, walking in circles and grabbing objects, and is designed to last for more than 10 years, the company said.

Engine AI, founded in October 2023, has already launched several humanoid robots, including SA01, an open-source bipedal robot meant for scientific research and educational use cases. That model is priced at only 38,500 yuan (US$5,250). The 138cm-tall PM01 is priced at a much higher 88,000 yuan.

The company has not disclosed its pricing for the more high-end SE01. Engine AI co-founder Yao Qiyuan told a Shenzhen news outlet last week that the company aims to keep the price of its full-sized humanoid robots between 150,000 yuan and 200,000 yuan.

The company also told Chinese outlet National Business Daily in November that it was working to keep the production costs of each humanoid robot under 100,000 yuan.

Engine AI was co-founded by Zhao Tongyang, who also founded another Chinese robotics start-up called Dogotix, which was acquired by the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) firm Xpeng in 2020. Zhao then co-founded the EV company's robotics unit before leaving to establish Engine AI.

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Tencent Holdings' super app WeChat was officially launched on HarmonyOS Next recently in China. This gives Huawei Technologies a vital ally, as it expands the reach of the home-grown mobile operating system and Android replacement.

The HarmonyOS version of WeChat has been available for download since 8 January, three months after Tencent began beta testing the app. The latest version supports key WeChat functions such as payments, short videos, live streaming and mini programs, in addition to messaging, audio and video calls, and social media page Moments - functions that already existed in the beta version.

With 1.38 billion monthly active users, WeChat has become a must-have digital tool for mainland Chinese users, making it indispensable for Huawei's goal to break the dominance of Google's Android and Apple's iOS in its home market.

Tencent last March 2024 assigned an experienced team to lead the development of WeChat's HarmonyOS version, the company said recently. The team has been in charge of building various versions of WeChat through the years, including for Nokia's Symbian mobile operating system.

Huawei has been rebuilding its consumer device business after U.S. sanctions decimated sales of its smartphones. Barred from accessing US-origin technologies, the Chinese tech giant has doubled down on efforts to reduce reliance on both foreign software and hardware.

Its Mate 70 flagship smartphones, which were unveiled in November and feature an in-house designed processor, employ HarmonyOS Next, the latest iteration of the Huawei platform that no longer supports Android apps.

The Shenzhen-based company has set a 2025 target for all of its smartphones and tablets to run on HarmonyOS Next.

Besides WeChat, Huawei also brought in other major Chinese apps, including TikTok's Chinese sibling Douyin and Alipay from Ant Group, a financial technology affiliate of South China Morning Post owner Alibaba Group Holding.

The HarmonyOS Next ecosystem, with over 15,000 native apps and services as of October, was "basically usable", Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu Zhijun said in November. The company expects the operating system to reach "maturity" by achieving 100,000 apps in the next six months to a year, he added.

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