ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces
What a week, folks, what a week! Buckle up, because ThursdAI just dropped, and this one's a doozy. We're talking seismic shifts in the open source world, a potential game-changer from DeepSeek AI that's got everyone buzzing, and oh yeah, just a casual $500 BILLION infrastructure project announcement. Plus, OpenAI finally pulled the trigger on "Operator," their agentic browser thingy – though getting it to actually operate proved to be a bit of a live show adventure, as you'll hear.
DeepSeek AI Unleashes R1
This week felt like one of those pivotal moments in AI, a real before-and-after kind of thing. DeepSeek's R1 hit the open source scene like a supernova, and suddenly, top-tier reasoning power is within reach for anyone with a Mac and a dream.
Hold onto your hats, open source AI just went supernova! The Chinese Whale Bros – DeepSeek AI, that quant trading firm turned AI powerhouse – dropped a bomb on the community in the best way possible: R1, their reasoning model, is now open source under the MIT license!
This isn't just a model, folks. DeepSeek unleashed a whole arsenal: two full-fat R1 models (DeepSeek R1 and DeepSeek R1-Zero), and a whopping six distilled finetunes based on Qwen (1.5B, 7B, 14B, and 32B) and Llama (8B, 72B).
License-wise, it's MIT, which as Nisten put it, "MIT is like a jailbreak to the whole legal system, pretty much. That's what most people don't realize. It's like, this is, it's not my problem. You're a problem now." Basically, do whatever you want with it. Distill it, fine-tune it, build Skynet – it's all fair game.
UI-TARS by ByteDance
Not to be outdone in the open source frenzy, ByteDance, the TikTok behemoth, dropped UI-TARS, a set of models designed to control your PC. They claim SOTA performance, beating even Anthropic's computer use models and, in some benchmarks, GPT-4o and Claude.
UI-TARS comes in 2B, 7B, and 72B parameter flavors, with desktop apps for Mac and PC. Imagine open source agents controlling your computer – the possibilities are both exciting and slightly terrifying.
Gemini Flash Thinking by Google
Google quietly dropped an update to Gemini Flash Thinking, their experimental reasoning model, with a 1 million token context window and code execution capabilities now baked in. Benchmarks are showing significant performance jumps in math and science evals, and the speed is "crazy usable."
And unlike some other reasoning models, Gemini Flash Thinking shows you its thinking process! You can actually see the chain of thought unfold, which is incredibly valuable for understanding and debugging.
OpenAI's Operator
The moment we were all waiting for: OpenAI finally unveiled Operator, their first foray into Level 3 Autonomy - agentic capabilities with ChatGPT. Operator is built on a new model called CUA (Computer Using Agent), trained on top of GPT-4, and it's designed to control a web browser in the cloud.
While Operator is initially launching in the US for Pro users only, and even then, it wasn't exactly smooth sailing. But the potential is massive, with benchmarks showing promising numbers.
Project Stargate
If R1 and Operator weren't enough to make your head spin, how about a $500 BILLION "Manhattan Project for AI infrastructure"? OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle announced Project Stargate, a massive investment in data centers, power plants, and everything else needed to fuel the AI revolution.
