The tech trial of the century pits Elon Musk against Sam Altman in a California courtroom battle that has it all: money, betrayal, egos, and the future of the most disruptive technology of our time, artificial intelligence (AI). Musk and Altman dominate the headlines, and their statements go viral within seconds, partly because they are such singular figures.
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Hangzhou, the city that gave birth to tech giant Alibaba and the DeepSeek model, and a showcase of China’s ambition in artificial intelligence (AI), has issued a legal warning regarding the labor limits of that very same technology. The Intermediate People’s Court of this eastern Chinese city has ruled illegal the dismissal of an employee whom his company attempted to replace with AI after demoting him and cutting his salary by 40%. Released on the eve of International Labor Day as part of a series of landmark cases concerning the protection of labor rights in the industry, the ruling draws a red line in a country determined to lead this new technological revolution, but increasingly vigilant to ensure that its costs do not erode social stability.
© Andy Wong (AP)
The still image is incredibly powerful; photographers know this better than anyone. And even in AI, it is the picture side of the product that is turbo-charging their gigantic businesses, according to a new report.
Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model Friday, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost reasoning model that matched the capabilities of US rivals.
DeepSeek-V4 “features an ultra-long context of one million words”, the company said in a statement on social media platform WeChat, hailing it as “cost-effective” in a separate announcement on X.
The announcement came as Meta said it planned to cut a tenth of its staff as it looks for productivity gains from the rest of the workforce while investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Reports said Microsoft was also looking to trim its ranks.
DeepSeek-V4’s context length, which determines how much input a model is able to absorb to help it complete tasks, “(achieves) leadership in both domestic and open-source fields across agent capabilities, world knowledge, and reasoning performance”.
A “preview version” of the open source model is now available, the company said.
DeepSeek-V4 is released as two versions, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with the latter being “a more efficient and economical choice” because it has smaller parameters.
V4-Pro has 1.6 trillion parameters while the V4-Flash has 284 billion parameters, which refine models’ decision-making ability.
The model has also been “optimised” for popular AI Agent products such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, OpenCode and CodeBuddy, the statement said.
“In world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, (Google’s) Gemini-Pro-3.1,” the statement added.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January last year with a generative AI chatbot, powered by its R1 reasoning model, that upended assumptions of US dominance in the strategic sector.
This so-called “DeepSeek shock” sparked a sell-off of AI-related shares and a reckoning on business strategy in what was also described as a “Sputnik moment” for the industry.
The chatbot performed at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top American offerings, but the company said it had taken significantly less computing power to develop.
However, its sudden popularity raised questions over data privacy and censorship, with the chatbot often refusing to answer questions on sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
At home, DeepSeek’s AI tools have been widely adopted by Chinese municipalities and healthcare institutions as well as the financial sector and other businesses.
This has been partly driven by DeepSeek’s decision to make its systems open source, with their inner workings public — in contrast to the proprietary models sold by OpenAI and other Western rivals.
“China-made large AI models spearheaded the development of the global open-source AI ecosystem,” Chinese Premier Li Qiang told an annual gathering of China’s top decision-makers last month.
The AI race has intensified the rivalry between China and the United States, and the White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal artificial intelligence technology.
“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” science and technology chief Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.
“We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”
The White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of a massive effort to steal US artificial intelligence technology and vowed to take action to prevent the alleged theft.
“The US has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” White House science and technology chief Michael Kratsios said in a post on X.
“We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”
Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.
In February, US AI developer Anthropic accused three Chinese firms, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, of running campaigns to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, describing it as intellectual property theft.
That same month, ChatGPT creator OpenAI sent a letter to US legislators accusing DeepSeek of using distillation techniques amid “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.”
Kratsios did not name any specific foreign entities in his post but said they “are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking techniques in coordinated campaigns to systematically extract American breakthroughs.”
The accusations come ahead of a planned May 14 summit in Beijing between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
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