Beyond the Mainframe Nº1 | Laika Ventures
New year, new wave of AI updates 🌊 USA vs China 🥊 Open-Source vs Closed-Source
Welcome to Laika Ventures’ first monthly newsletter! We promise to bring you the most relevant news on AI, fire 🔥 discussions, and more.
We all know trying to stay updated on what’s happening in AI can be difficult with so much going on. January 2025 was no different, with a month full of breakthroughs and big changes in the world. While the EU 🇪🇺 is looking into how to regulate AI, with President Donald Trump back in office, the USA 🇺🇸 looks the other way. The AI race seems real, and in this month there was a lot of dispute around which country was winning: USA 🇺🇸, or China 🇨🇳? And another big question related to how to win this race is between open-source models and closed-source models.
Let’s go!
📰 News on AI this month
Donald Trump is back in office 🇺🇸
What does this mean for AI? Donald Trump has made several statements emphasizing the importance of AI to the USA, and appointed David Sacks as the “AI and Crypto Czar”.
The day after returning to the office, Trump supported the announcement of the Stargate project and its $100 billion investment by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle by saying it would be “the largest AI infrastructure project in history”. As we will see later, Stargate will play an important role in AI news this month.
In his remarks at the World Economic Forum, he mentioned the energy requirements (AI consumes a lot of energy to process information) for AI to be “as big as we want to have it” and mentioned the underlying fight with China (”it will be very competitive with China and others”). For that, he suggested building electric generating facilities to support the needs of the AI facilities, without relying on the existing power grid.
Trump fulfills his promise to revoke Biden’s AI Executive Order. In order to solidify USA’s leadership in AI, the Trump administration believes the government shouldn’t control AI development and deployment.
Stargate project ✨
As mentioned before, OpenAI announced the creation of a company that will build new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the USA by investing $500b over the next four years, and $100b right away. Stargate’s founders are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX.
Right after the announcement, Elon Musk publicly shared that he doesn’t believe they have the money, SoftBank (in particular), for this kind of investment. Sam Altman quickly responded and stated “Wrong, as you surely know” and asked for him to put America first in his new role (talking about DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency).
Other public figures also expressed themselves on what Elon said. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in an interview with CNBC, mentioned that the partnership with OpenAI continues and commented on the $500B Stargate project by saying: “All I know is, I’m good for my $80b. I’m gonna spend $80b.”
EU AI Regulation 🇪🇺
And while the USA gets rid of AI regulations, the EU AI Act will prohibit AI systems that they recognize as “unacceptable risk” starting in February 2025. The AI Act was the first regulation on AI to exist and became law in August 2024.
What’s this “DeepSeek” that everyone talks about? 🐋
DeepSeek is a Chinese startup that’s building an open-source AI model that just released its latest model with performance very similar to OpenAI-o1, even though it was developed with significantly less financial and computational resources. This has been the most talked about topic in AI this week and started, once again, the conversation on open-source vs closed-source models and who’s leading the AI scene: USA vs China.
This announcement raised concerns about the future demand for high-performance AI chips. Because of that, on January 27, 2025, Nvidia’s stock dropped 16.97%, wiping out $600 billion in market capitalization. This was considered the largest single-day market value loss for a U.S. company in history.
The talk about DeepSeek isn’t over and they just released a new AI image model that outperforms major competitors like DALL-E.
Since DeepSeek's success just a few days ago, investors have started to shift focus from AI infrastructure suppliers to AI buyers, such as software companies that benefit from less expensive AI development and deployment.
What’s new on OpenAI?
OpenAI main updates are related to the Stargate project announcement, introducing Operator and introducing ChatGPT Gov.
OpenAI launched “Operator” which is an agent that can perform tasks in a user’s browser. For now it’s only available to US users. On the same day as OpenAI introduces an agent that can perform tasks, Perplexity (an AI chat focused on search) can now perform tasks in the web.
ChatGPT Gov is designed to streamline government agencies’ access to OpenAI’s frontier models and take advantage of AI systems on their own private environment.
🗣️ Relevant Discussions
AI & War
AI will kill more humans than… humans.
Warzones will have fewer humans and more hardware.
However, during this transition, some countries will lead the way:
For example, the Israeli army has developed Lavender, an AI designed to generate assassination targets.
This raises an important question:
When AI kills civilians, who is responsible—the developer, the general, or the minister?
Even when a human soldier pulls the trigger, the answer isn’t always black and white.
-Ricardo Macedo, Managing Partner at Laika Ventures
🇵🇹 AI in Portugal
We’re a portuguese company based in Braga, and we’re all about celebrating 🇵🇹 portuguese innovations!
Rows.com, the world’s sexiest spreadsheet, AI Analyst can now import data from web APIs.
Ivo Bernardo, co-founder of DareData Engineering has started his weekly AI newsletter. Check it out here
DareData has become an official NVIDIA partner, becoming the first Portugal NVIDIA partnership focused on AI software.
Sword Health has acquired Surgery Hero, which will allow the company to broaden their AI Care platform.
The AI Hub, a physical space in Lisbon that brings the AI community together, hosted an AI break this month.
→ If you’re doing amazing things in Portugal and we didn’t highlight it, let us know! We keep our eyes wide open but sometimes we can miss something 😉
🐾 Join us!
We’re hosting a coworking day and AI event (that we like to call Orbit) on the 19th February in Porto.
Check what we’re doing at laikaventures.co. Thanks for reading!
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