DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, is considering increasing its latest funding round from an initial 50 billion yuan to as much as 100 billion yuan ($14.9 billion). The company is attracting interest mainly from government-backed and corporate investors, including Tencent, CATL, and Geely Auto, while turning away private individual funds. The fundraising process is ongoing, with a target valuation of around 500 billion yuan ($75 billion).
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-06
Reflection AI has introduced Beam, a 501-billion-parameter open-weight model designed for reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks. Trained on nearly 24 trillion tokens, Beam claims to match Chinese models' performance while requiring significantly less inference compute. The company positions Beam as a cost-effective alternative to both Western and Chinese AI models, targeting enterprise and public sector applications.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-05
Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis, has released DwarfStar 4 (ds4), a lightweight C-based inference engine for running large open-weight language models locally on high-memory Mac, CUDA and ROCm hardware. The tool supports models including DeepSeek V4, V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.x and Qwen3.8 Flash Next, covering text and vision, with a local API, CLI and native agent, and is released under the MIT license.
dwarfstar.sh
· 2026-10-02
DeepSeek has launched Harness, an open-source desktop application for macOS and Windows built on Cordis's plugin-based architecture. The tool can also be run as a web UI launched from code, and supports tasks like file organization, coding assistance, research, and background script execution.
deepseek.com
· 2026-10-02
DeepSeek, working with Huawei, has published open-source programming libraries for Huawei's Ascend AI chips, including DeepGEMM-Ascend for matrix computations and DeepEP-Ascend for chip-to-chip communication, plus Ascend support for the TileLang programming language. The tools were developed and tested on Ascend 950 hardware, including a 128-chip supernode system, according to a September 30 Reuters report.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-01
The Call Center Doctors rented a four-GPU Nvidia H200 server on September 27 to run DeepSeek V4.1 Flash for its Claude Code coding agents instead of Claude Opus 5.5. The firm found the on-demand box cost $440.88 a day versus $184-$223 a day to get the same work done through DeepSeek's API, and it ultimately switched back to Opus 5.5, which worked out cheaper than keeping the rented hardware running.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-01
DeepSeek has published a series of KV cache optimizations—including MLA architecture, Compressed Sparse Attention, and now CSA2 with cross-layer reuse and FP4 caching—that reportedly shrink cache memory footprint per token by roughly 437x compared to its earlier V1 model. These techniques reduce the VRAM needed to serve long-context sessions such as coding assistants, and the report says other labs have begun using similar approaches without crediting DeepSeek.
insufferable.dev
· 2026-09-30
Rep. Ro Khanna, top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China, sent letters to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and to DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI. He asked ODNI to assess US readiness for an AI system losing control, similar to an OpenAI agent incident involving Hugging Face, and to evaluate China's approach to catastrophic AI risk. He also asked the three Chinese companies for documentation on their pursuit of 'superintelligence,' recursive self-improvement, and any safety safeguards.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-29
China has expanded its overseas travel restrictions on top AI and chip professionals to now include their spouses and children, according to people familiar with the matter. These relatives must now obtain approval from Beijing before traveling abroad, even for short trips, extending curbs previously applied only to executives and researchers at firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek since earlier this year.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-28
Usage data shared with CNBC shows Chinese AI models from firms like DeepSeek, Z.ai and Alibaba now account for a majority of tokens processed on developer platforms OpenRouter and Vercel, up sharply from early 2026. On OpenRouter, Chinese models' share rose to 57%-67% in mid-September from 6%-13% in February; on Vercel it climbed to 55% in August from 11% in January. Two U.S. House committees are investigating the trend amid existing export controls on advanced chips to China.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-26
A web-based compiler combines any base font (like Inter or Roboto) with a chosen tokenizer (such as DeepSeek, GPT tokenizers, or Llama 3) to produce a 'token-space font' where every token occupies the same visual width. Users can preview text in the browser, upload custom fonts or tokenizers via Hugging Face links, and export compiled fonts, with an optional 'lite mode' for smaller file sizes.
ampdot.mesh.host
· 2026-09-26
Ahead of Xi Jinping's first U.S. state visit in over a decade, Huawei moved forward the release of its next AI chip by three quarters, Alibaba launched what it called China's most powerful AI processor, and DeepSeek reportedly assembled the largest known cluster of Huawei chips. The releases come as Washington continues restricting China's access to advanced Nvidia chips and chipmaking equipment.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-24
GoKawiil