DeepSeek speeds up R2 timeline

Read time: under 4 minutes

Welcome back, Superhuman. Was DeepSeek’s R1 just a weird blip in the annals of AI history — or is the Chinese startup here to stay? That all depends on what it does next. Reports suggest it’s racing to put out R2 ahead of schedule in order to keep up with US rivals.

Today’s Insights

• Alibaba’s SOTA video model, Photoshop on-the-go, and Meta’s new plans

• DeepSeek’s new strategy for R2

• Tutorial: How to do competitor analysis with Deep Research

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Alibaba’s new open-source video model takes VLM top slot: The Chinese e-commerce giant’s Wan2.1 just swept the competition on the industry-leading VBench, which measures things like motion smoothness, text rendering, and physics accuracy.

• It beats rivals like OpenAI’s Sora, Hailuo’s MiniMax, and Luma’s Dream Machine.

• Plus, its code and weights are publicly available, letting programmers create their own spinoffs — something that’s rare for models of this caliber.

• Here’s a thread with some examples of what it can do.

2. Adobe drops first fully-featured Photoshop mobile app: Photographers and designers now have the full power of Photoshop right at their fingertips, literally. The image-editing app — including its suite of AI features — has landed on the iPhone, with an Android version coming soon. Users can now use Firefly to generate backgrounds, remove unwanted items, or expand a scene beyond its original frame directly in the app.

3. Zuckerberg eyes a big expansion: According to The Information, Meta is reportedly planning to build a new AI data center that could cost over $200 billion in Louisiana, Wyoming, or Texas – dwarfing the initial plans for a $10 billion center. This could be part of the company's ambitious expansion plans, which include up to $65 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

DeepSeek’s R2 is coming sooner than expected

There’s been a change of plans. DeepSeek originally aimed to release its R1 successor in May, but Claude 3.7, Grok 3, and the soon-to-be-unveiled GPT-4.5 have sent the company scrambling to shorten that timeline.

In fact, China’s entire AI industry is reportedly kicking things into high gear, with Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance racing to get their hands on as many Nvidia H20 chips (the less-powerful ones that aren’t subject to US sanctions) as possible.

There’s a lot on the line: R1 sent a trillion-dollar shockwave through the global economy last month as investors started to question their AI spending habits. They took a big sigh of relief when OpenAI and other rivals quickly countered with impressive reasoning models of their own. But news of R2’s impending release has them holding their breaths again.

What’s at stake? If DeepSeek can drop another state-of-the-art reasoning model with just a tiny fraction of its competitors’ funding, it could send the industry into a tailspin all over again. On the other hand, if the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic can hold onto their leads, they’ll prove that scaling up with bigger and bigger data centers really was worth it all along.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to do competitor analysis using Deep Research

• Go to ChatGPT and sign up with your account.

• Select ‘o3-mini’ model and turn on ‘Deep Research’ feature.

• Enter your prompt and press enter.

Sample Prompt: Do an analysis of the [enter name] industry. Create a list of the top 5 [enter industry name]. Analyze every aspect you can find from team size and roles, brand strength, prices, and revenue. Also list strengths and weaknesses of each [enter business name]. Be as detailed as possible. This report will be used by these [enter industry] to guide their business strategy and millions of dollars are at stake. Scope: All kinds of [enter your business niche]. Rank them based on list size and estimated revenue. Metrics: Dive into other metrics like audience demographics, engagement rates, monetization strategies, partnerships, and so on. Geographical Focus: Global but especially the [targeted market] Competitor Benchmarking: Analyze them separately and at the end create a comparison chart.

• You’ll get a detailed analysis (~10k+ words) with all the key details in a few minutes.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🧑‍💻 Copilot Crusher: Google is giving away its AI coding platform, Gemini Code Assist, at no cost, with usage limits 90 times higher than GitHub Copilot’s equivalent.

📚 Mind Multiplier: OpenAI says ChatGPT’s new deep research feature is rolling out to all Plus, Team, Edu, and Enterprise users. They’ll get 10 queries per month.

🤔 Ready and Waiting: Replit unveiled Agent v2, a new update that lets the Claude 3.7-powered coding assistant think deeply about programming decisions, boosting its overall performance.

🏭 Against the Grain: A new report suggests Microsoft could be scaling back some of its AI infrastructure projects — even as rivals like OpenAI and Apple go all-in on AI spending.

💰 Funding: Tel Aviv-based startup Quantum Machines raised $170M to help fellow tech companies get ready for the transition to quantum computing. And on the heels of its new frontier model Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic announced it’s upping its next funding round to $3.5B, giving it a $61.5B valuation. Plus, Perplexity just launched a $50 million VC fund focused on early-stage AI startups.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Data Visualization

Prompt: [upload data] Create a line graph to show the trend in [enter data set of interest, i.e website traffic] over the past year.

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SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

✍️ Writer’s Reckoning: Despite the AI boom sending him into an “existential crisis,” writing instructor David Perell shares his advice for how to incorporate LLMs into your writing workflow.

👾 Catch ‘Em All: One way Anthropic tested Claude 3.7’s reasoning capabilities: Watching how well it plays Pokémon. At first, it just ran away from the game’s bosses. Eventually though, it made some surprising moves, like asking for a reset after getting stuck in the corner of one level. (Here’s the full story.)

🍓 Sweet Surprise: Claude 3.7’s “Strawberry” easter egg is getting more and more elaborate.

🎚️ Level Up: One X user found a surprisingly simple prompt to make the base version of ChatGPT act more like ChatGPT Plus — although the jury’s still out on whether the hack actually works.

🧠 Knowledge is Power: Data scientist Avi Chawla breaks down (with charts) the difference between transformers and mixture of experts — two major strains of AI architecture.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

City Walks

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Zain & the Superhuman AI team