Musk pouts about being left out of Stargate AI project; beware of Chinese AI tech

Advanced Computing, AI/ML, Chips, and Extended Reality

Good morning,

What a week it was, last week—although it was fairly quiet in fundraising news with Anthropic topping the charts as it raised a fresh $1B from previous backer Google, even as it is raising a $2B round led by Lightspeed at a $60B valuation. DeepSeek has emerged from China with a low-cost, high performing AI model that appears to be competitive with OpenAI’s o1 advanced reasoning model. Beware of the baked in biases of the model though, as it is clearly highly-censored (check out the Editor’s Picks below for more on that).

President Trump announced last week the Stargate effort, a $500B AI public-private effort with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Oracle, amongst others. The President’s special advisor Elon Musk came out vehemently opposing Stargate—most likely because his AI company xAI wasn’t invited to the party. The President, for his part, dismissed Musk’s criticisms while acknowledging that the project is a multi-year effort that may not have all of the funding necessary to…