☕️ Baidu Looks to Reposition Itself as China's AI Tech Leader

With the West and China duking it out on AI's grandest stage, Baidu rejoins the fray on the side of China as its two most recent AI models in the Ernie line prove to be fierce competitors. Other key highlights:

• Google announces Google Assistant's retirement in favor of a Gemini takeover

• Intel's AI manufacturing operations to go through a major rehaul courtesy of incoming CEO Lip-Bu Tan

• DeepSeek employees face tighter travel restrictions as China's government looks to protect its AI trade secrets

Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!

Baidu releases two new fiercely powerful AI models in a bid to make it China's best in AI once more

China's very own Google, Baidu, dropped a bombshell bit of news during the weekend as, in an attempt to reclaim its spot as China's AI leader, the company announced two new AI models: Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5. Ernie X1 enters Baidu's suite as its first reasoning model, which the company's claims and benchmark reveals say is "on par with DeepSeek-R1 at only half the price." Meanwhile, Ernie 4.5 is a GPT-4.5-type multimodal foundational AI model that, if true, achieves equal or better performance at just 1% of the cost while OpenAI's GPT-4.5 is one of the company's most ridiculously expensive offerings.

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​And the company's stocks felt the brunt of the news​

​Shares of the Chinese tech giant skyrocketed by as much as 11% by the end of the day in Asia on Tuesday, with investors seemingly satisfied and confident in the company, even if it was a "delayed response" to Baidu's new AI releases. Senior equity analyst at Morningstar, Kai Wang, noted that while Baidu may not yet be as favored "as the other hyperscalers," its strong platform is set up well to heavily benefit from rising enterprise demand for cloud services once things get going.

Google Assistant passes on the torch to Gemini as its retirement after nearly 9 years of service is announced

With Google's push to make Gemini its next big thing, it should come as no surprise then when Google recently announced that it is officially retiring Google Assistant. The blog post states that the current version of Google Assistant "will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores" sometime "later this year." Devices ranging from tablets to cars to watches currently fitted with Google Assistant will be upgraded to Gemini, as Google Assistant's near-9-year-long tenure slowly comes to an end.

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Intel's incoming CEO Lip-Bu Tan reveals his big plans to completely overhaul the company's AI operations

Intel's soon-to-be-appointed CEO Lip-Bu Tan is set to radically revamp the company's manufacturing and AI strategies in a bid to restore its competitiveness following downfall after downfall. Tan aims to streamline operations by restructuring chip production, cutting bloated middle management, and boosting contract manufacturing to win over big-time players like Nvidia and Google. His turnaround plan focuses on improving yield with the new "18A" process and eventually launching compelling AI chips in 2027, with significant changes expected to begin immediately.

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China imposes tighter restrictions on DeepSeek's employees to protect the country's AI trade secrets

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup behind the acclaimed DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model that shocked the West, is now reportedly under much stricter government influence, according to an article by The Information. DeepSeek employees have allegedly had tighter restrictions regarding abroad travel imposed on them with its parent company High-Flyer holding certain staff passports. As China aims to make itself the hub for AI's greatest advancements, these measures are in line with the country wanting its AI researchers to avoid traveling to the US in order to protect trade secrets.

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xAI acquires generative video startup Hotshot in a likely bid to improve its own offerings

Elon Musk's AI company xAI has recently acquired Hotshot, a startup working on AI-powered video generation tools similar to OpenAI's Sora, announced by Hotshot's CEO Aakash Sastry on X/Twitter. Launched back in 2023, Hotshot started out working on developing AI tools for photo creation and editing, though it eventually ended up pivoting to work on text-to-video AI models instead. According to Sastry, xAI plans to scale Hotshot's promising tech on its massive Colossus cluster as it develops new video generation capabilities to give its Grok chatbot platform an edge over competitors.

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Alphabet returns to the negotiations table to buy up AI cybersecurity company Wiz for $30 billion

Google's parent company Alphabet is reportedly back in negotiation talks negotiations to buy up Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz for more than $30 billion. This deal would be $7 billion more expensive than last year's proposed $23 billion deal in July 2024 but was abandoned by Wiz due to concerns it would not clear antitrust hurdles. If finalized, the acquisition would further buff Alphabet's cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity capabilities by integrating Wiz's AI-powered, cloud-based security solutions into its arsenal.

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Known for its aggressive investing tactics, Y Combinator-backed startups have become some of the most profitable and fastest growing in all of known fund history, and company CEO Garry Tan believes it has AI to thank for the milestones.