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$500 Billion Stargate and PhD-Level Super Agents

Plus, China is catching up with new reasoning and 3D generator models

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The week’s most interesting and relevant AI news and analysis

This Week in AI

In perhaps the biggest AI news of the week, OpenAI announced a $500 billion collaboration with Softbank, Nvidia, Oracle, MGX, Microsoft, and ARM to create a new joint venture, Stargate. This comes just a week after OpenAI released an Economic Blueprint document outlining the need for significant investment in AI to boost national security, improve AI access, and spread economic opportunities. Stargate will build next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run the powerful AI models of the future. The new company will invest $100 billion in 2025 and plans to spend a total of $500 billion over the next four years. Elon Musk threw cold water on the project, saying its backers "don’t actually have the money.” The move is sure to have set off alarm bells in the board rooms of competitors who are likely to accelerate their infrastructure investment plans. Meta, Amazon, xAI, and Google….your move. President Trump announced the news at the White House. Perhaps the two biggest beneficiaries of the deal saw stock price increases. Oracle stock jumped over 15% on the news, while Nvidia was up 10%.

We usually don’t mention new phone launches here at Synthetic, but Samsung’s new S25 is different. It’s the first phone to showcase some early features from Google DeepMind’s Project Astra digital assistant, now packaged as Gemini Live. Gemini Live is available on Samsung S24, S25, and the Pixel 9, with future Project Astra features available only on the S25. There are no details yet on when Gemini Live will come to other Android phones or Apple’s iPhone (if it ever does). Apple certainly has a lot of catching up to do with Apple Intelligence.

Axios reports that OpenAI is having a couple of big weeks in Washington. Beyond attending the inauguration and the huge Stargate announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also scheduled to deliver a closed-door briefing for U.S. government officials on January 30th. Rumors abound that this meeting heralds a next-level breakthrough in agentic AI. For months, it has been rumored that OpenAI will launch a new ChatGPT feature named Operator that can use a browser to perform tasks. Synthetic expects this feature to launch as soon as this week. There are also rumors of a new feature codenamed ‘Caterpillar’ that appears to do deep research. One thing is for sure: the pace of AI development will likely only accelerate in 2025.

Quick Hits

Video: OpenAI Product Chief on Stargate, Agents and Future AI Models and Products

The Wall Street Journal interviewed OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil at Davos and discussed OpenAI’s latest models, timelines for future product releases, and the new Stargate deal. It’s worth your time to understand more about OpenAI’s philosophy, approach, and future product roadmap. (35m)

AI Tech and Innovation

Hunyuan3D 2.0 open-source model to create 3D assets

Tencent’s new Hunyuan3D 2.0 open-source model turns single images or text descriptions into detailed, textured 3D models. And it does it in seconds. Company researchers said that “creating high-quality 3D assets is a time-intensive process for artists, making automatic generation a long-term goal.” Details of the model are outlined in this technical report.

The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming! As the geopolitical battle for AI supremacy continues (see the main story on Stargate) Chinese researchers have surprised the AI community by releasing the DeepSeek R1 model under an open-source license. DeepSeek claims its model performs comparably to OpenAI’s o1 on various mathematical reasoning and programming benchmarks. Until December, o1 was OpenAI’s flagship reasoning model, illustrating that despite export limits on leading-edge AI chips, Chinese researchers are now just months behind leading U.S. companies.

DeepSeek R1 vs OpenAI o1 benchmark results. Source: DeepSeek.

People using OpenAI’s new o1 model have noticed a curious phenomenon: Even when asked a question in English, the model sometimes begins to reason its way through the problem in Chinese, Persian, Hindi, Thai, or another language. AI models are trained with data from many languages and are naturally multilingual. They may simply choose languages they find most efficient to achieve an objective. Since all languages are ultimately turned into tokens inside the model, the difference between human languages may almost seem arbitrary to the AI. Perhaps the right question is: Why would a multilingual AI only use English to solve problems?

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AI Insights

Scene from ‘The Brutalist’ starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones (and some AI)

The Golden Globe-winning movie The Brutalist has drawn criticism after its editor revealed that AI was used to produce the film. In the movie, actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones speak Hungarian, a language they learned for the film. AI was used to improve the authenticity of the dialogue for words and phrases that were particularly hard to pronounce. Voice cloning technology was also used in Emilia Perez, causing further controversy for the Oscar season as Academy voters are asked to vote for movies that use technology they held a lengthy strike over just a year before. Will these former Oscar favorites lose ground with these revelations?

“Taxi Driver” writer Paul Schrader says he was stunned when he asked ChatGPT to generate plots for movies by famous filmmakers. “Every idea ChatGPT came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good ideas when AI can provide one in seconds?”

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