Top stories today:

1. NVIDIA loses ~$600B in market cap as Altman says plans unchanged
2. DeepSeek releases Janus Pro, new open-weight image models
3. Trump vows tariffs “much bigger” than 2.5% on semiconductors
4. Alibaba launches Qwen 2.5-VL models with advanced agentic capabilities
5. Trump says Microsoft eyeing TikTok bid to keep in U.S.

0. Data and calendar

Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):

1. NVIDIA loses ~$600B in market cap, largest drop ever, as Altman says plans unchanged

NVIDIA was -17% yesterday, but is already +4% in the pre-market:

• Dropped from #1 to #3 most valuable company, after Apple and Microsoft.

• Today: Asian tech stocks also fell.

• DeepSeek is explicitly sending user data to China, according to its own privacy policy.

• How a focus on reinforcement learning supports DeepSeek’s R1: analysis.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth -$21B to $103.6B

• Moved to the 17th spot on Forbes’ richest-person list.

Sam Altman called it an “impressive model,” but “we will obviously deliver much better models,” and we “believe more compute is more important now than ever”

• Separately, Trump called DeepSeek’s progress “positive” and said it's “wake-up call” for the U.S. industry.

• “An excellent AI advancement,” NVIDIA said of DeepSeek’s R1 model, despite its losses.

3. DeepSeek releases Janus Pro, new open-weight image models with 1B-7B parameters

Janus Pro 7B has challenged OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, PixArt-alpha, Emu3-Gen, and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion XL on the GenEval and DPG-Bench benchmarks, per DeepSeek:

• MIT licensed.

• Relatedly, DeepSeek said it was “temporarily limiting registrations” due to facing “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services.

Relatedly, DeepSeek V3 API is seen to have -40% in output speed since its launch on Dec. 26, to ~50 output tokens/s from 85 tokens/s

• DeepSeek is also seen leveraging hardware, engineering, and large-scale parallelism to optimize AI speeds on the inferior H800 GPUs.

4. Trump vows tariffs “much bigger” than 2.5% on areas including semiconductors