DeepSeek a ‘wake-up call’ for US tech, Google Maps to rename Gulf of Mexico
US President Donald Trump has called the rise of Chinese company DeepSeek “a wake-up call” for the US tech industry, after the emergence of its artificial intelligence (AI) model triggered shockwaves on Wall Street. Shares in major tech firms such as Nvidia fell sharply, with the chip giant losing almost $600bn (£482bn) in market value. What has shaken the industry is DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model was made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals – raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance and the scale of investments US firms are planning. DeepSeek has become the most downloaded free app in the US just a week after it was launched. BBC
Based on the limited numbers of comparisons made so far, DeepSeek’s AI models appear to be faster, smaller, and a whole lot cheaper than the best offerings from the supposed titans of AI like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. And here’s the kicker, the Chinese offering appears to be just as good. So how have they done it? Firstly, it looks like DeepSeek’s engineers have thought about what an AI needs to do rather than what it might be able to do. It doesn’t need to work out every possible answer to a question, just the best one – to two decimal places. Their models are still massive computer programmes, DeepSeek-V3 has 671 billion variables. Sky News
Google Maps has said it will rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America after Donald Trump ordered the change. The US tech giant said it would follow the US government in renaming the gulf, which is ringed by the US, Mexico and Cuba. The company has been under pressure from US Republicans to apply the name change quickly after Mr Trump signed an executive order on the matter last week. Google has not yet made the change but said it would update the gulf’s name for users in America. Telegraph
Donald Trump has suggested that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app. When asked if Microsoft was in talks to buy the app, the US president said “I would say yes”, adding “A lot of interest in TikTok. There’s great interest in TikTok.” Microsoft, TikTok and ByteDance did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for a comment outside regular business hours, after the US president’s comments to reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday. The Guardian
Today Apple has released iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3 to the public. The new software version adds Visual Intelligence support for adding events to the Calendar app straight from posters or flyers and identifying more plants and animals. The update also removes Apple Intelligence Notification summaries for news and entertainment apps, as those were sometimes misleading. This is a temporary measure, Apple says, and you can opt in to receive these again in the future if you want.
All summaries made by Apple Intelligence are now italicized, to better distinguish them from other notifications. Settings for Notification summaries can be managed from the Lock Screen, you just need to swipe and tap Options. This also lets you quickly disable notification summaries for a specific app. GSM Arena
