#Startup
Y Combinator Launches AI Startup School
SF-based startup accelerator Y Combinator is launching its first-ever AI startup school in San Francisco on June 16 and 17th. The event will bring together 2,000 top AI students and researchers. The event will feature leaders including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, and World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li, among others, who will share insights on building the future of AI. The waitlist is open for registration.
#Tesla
Elon Musk claims Tesla will launch a self-driving service in Austin in June
Elon Musk announced plans to launch a paid ride-hailing robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, by June 2025, utilizing Tesla’s own fleet equipped with Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. This move aims to establish Tesla’s presence in the autonomous ride-hailing market, with potential expansion to other U.S. cities.
#Investment, #Asia
Asia Venture Funding Tanks To 10-Year Low
In 2024, venture funding in Asia plummeted to $65.8 billion, matching a decade-low last seen in 2014. This decline was observed across all funding stages except seed and angel investments. Factors contributing to this downturn include geopolitical tensions and challenges within China’s economy. Notably, the fourth quarter did show some recovery following a particularly weak third quarter.
#DeepSeek
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup founded in 2023 and backed by the High-Flyer hedge fund, has rapidly emerged as a leader in artificial intelligence. The company focuses on foundational AI technologies and is committed to open-sourcing its models. Its latest R1 model has outperformed OpenAI’s o1 in multiple reasoning benchmarks. DeepSeek’s innovative approaches, such as the multi-head latent attention (MLA) architecture and the DeepSeekMoE sparse structure, have significantly reduced computational costs, enabling them to offer services at a fraction of competitors’ prices. Here are several articles that will help you get an overall view of the surging tech company.
Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race
The interview of DeepSeek’s CEO revails his deep thinking and ambition of AI and tech innovation.
Who Is Liang Wenfeng? DeepSeek Chief’s Journey From Math Geek to Global Disruptor
Liang Wenfeng, a Chinese engineer, transitioned from founding a successful hedge fund to establishing DeepSeek, an AI company that has rapidly become a global disruptor. Leveraging a team of young engineers and innovative programming techniques, DeepSeek developed a top-tier AI system, despite U.S. export controls.
Microsoft brings a DeepSeek model to its cloud
Microsoft has integrated DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model into its Azure AI Foundry service, offering enterprises advanced AI capabilities. The R1 model has undergone extensive safety evaluations to ensure secure deployment.
How DeepSeek-R1 was built.
Complete hardware + software setup for running Deepseek-R1 locally.
Step by step guide to setting up and running the full DeepSeek-R1 model locally.