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Rani Molla

What the competition — Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft — is saying about DeepSeek

News of DeepSeek’s AI models pummeled American AI stocks yesterday. Leaders of the competition were quick to comment on how DeepSeek was seemingly able to do more for so much less.

While OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman struck a genial tone about how DeepSeek’s ingenuity was impressive and welcome competition, Nvidia was a little more backhanded, suggesting that DeepSeek just did the easy part:

“DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling. DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant. Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking. We now have three scaling laws: pre-training and post-training, which continue, and new test-time scaling.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested on LinkedIn that DeepSeek is sort of a rising tide that will raise all ships, invoking Jevons Paradox, the idea that increased efficiency would drive demand.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for his part, seems to have gone the sour grapes route, agreeing with Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang that DeepSeek probably has more high-powered Nvidia chips than they’re letting on.

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Rani Molla
1/23/26
Final Boss:

Keep
on
truckin’

tech
Rani Molla

Amazon to lay off thousands more office workers on path to 30,000 cuts

Amazon plans to axe thousands of corporate workers next week, after laying off 14,000 back in October, according to Reuters. The new cuts could be “roughly the same” number as last time and may hit Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video, and human resources, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The company plans to cut a total of 30,000 corporate positions as part of an effort to “streamline operations and reset its culture,” Business Insider reported separately, noting comments from CEO Andy Jassy, who said the earlier layoffs were “about culture” rather than AI-related cost cutting.

Exclusive: Amazon plans thousands more corporate job cuts next week, sources say

Exclusive: Amazon plans thousands more corporate job cuts next week, sources say

The company plans to cut a total of 30,000 corporate positions as part of an effort to “streamline operations and reset its culture,” Business Insider reported separately, noting comments from CEO Andy Jassy, who said the earlier layoffs were “about culture” rather than AI-related cost cutting.

Little Bay Beach

There are now more than 1 million “.ai” websites, contributing an estimated $70 million to Anguilla’s government revenue last year

Data from Domain Name Stat reveals that the top-level domain originally assigned to the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla passed the milestone in early January.

David Crowther, Claire Yubin Oh1/23/26
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Claire Yubin Oh

TikTok closes deal to operate in the US

TikTok has finally sealed its deal to establish a majority American-owned joint venture to manage its US operations.

On Friday, the social media company announced that its US arm will now be led by three “managing investors” — Silver Lake, Oracle, and MGX, each with a 15% holding — while ByteDance retains 19.9% of the business, and a swath of other investors, including Michael Dell’s family office, round out the cap table.

The joint venture will be operated by a seven-person majority American board of directors, which includes TikTok CEO Shou Chew, with Adam Presser, previously TikTok’s head of operations, trust, and safety, as its CEO.

Though the valuation of the new venture has not been shared, Vice President JD Vance has previously cited the market value of TikTok’s US operations at about $14 billion, just topping Snap and lower than Pinterest.

The deal closes the platform’s battle, which kicked off in earnest in August 2020 when President Donald Trump first tried to ban TikTok over national security concerns. The announcement notes that the new TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will “secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm.” Trump celebrated the deal, which has been signed off by both the US and Chinese governments, per Reuters, in a Truth Social post, saying TikTok “will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World.”

tech
Rani Molla

Elon Musk says Tesla Robotaxis are operating without drivers, sending stock higher

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla’s Robotaxis are now operating in Austin without a safety monitor. Tesla has been testing driverless cars in the area for about a month, and Musk had previously said the company would remove safety drivers by the end of 2025.

It’s unclear how many exactly of the roughly 50 Robotaxis the company operates in the area don’t have drivers. Tesla is “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors, and the ratio will increase over time,” Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, posted shortly after Musk. Ethan McKenna, the person behind Robotaxi Tracker, estimates it’s two or three vehicles.

What is clear is that the move is good for Tesla’s stock, which is currently up 3.5%, extending its gains after Musk’s tweet. Morgan Stanley said yesterday that it considers the removal of safety drivers a “precursor to personal unsupervised FSD rollout.” Unsupervised Full Self-Driving is widely considered to be integral to the would-be autonomous company’s value proposition.

At the World Economic Forum earlier on Thursday, Musk said, “Self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point.”

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