Many in the tech industry have been praising DeepSeek over the recent
release of its reasoning model, R1. R1 seemingly matches or beats
OpenAI's
o1


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TLDR

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TLDR 2025-01-27

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BIG TECH & STARTUPS

DEEPSEEK GETS SILICON VALLEY TALKING (2 MINUTE READ) [5]

Many in the tech industry have been praising DeepSeek over the recent
release of its reasoning model, R1. R1 seemingly matches or beats
OpenAI's o1 model on certain benchmarks. It only cost $5.6 million to
train, much less than the hundreds of millions of dollars it has taken
leading US companies to train their models. The company achieved all
this while facing US sanctions that prohibit the sale of advanced
chips to Chinese companies. DeepSeek's AI assistant is now the top
free app in the Apple App Store.

ORACLE AND MICROSOFT ARE REPORTEDLY IN TALKS TO TAKE OVER TIKTOK (2
MINUTE READ) [6]

Oracle, Microsoft, and a group of investors are in talks to take over
TikTok's global operations. The deal will allow ByteDance to keep a
minority stake in TikTok while the app's algorithm, data collection,
and software updates will be overseen by Oracle. Oracle's server
network already provides the bulk of TikTok's backbone. President
Trump earlier issued an executive order giving TikTok and others a
75-day reprieve from any enforcement action related to the US'
requirement that ByteDance divest from TikTok.

¨

SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

WHAT DID DEEPSEEK FIGURE OUT ABOUT REASONING WITH DEEPSEEK-R1? (4
MINUTE READ) [7]

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek recently released a reasoning model trained
on a GPU cluster a fraction the size of any of the big western AI labs
that is better than the current best reasoning models. Reasoning
models are able to 'think' about questions, which results in better
answers. DeepSeek used a reinforcement learning approach, as opposed
to a fine-tuning approach, to train its reasoning model, which
resulted in cost and quality benefits. This approach can only really
train the model on coding and mathematics, but this might not matter
as superintelligence in coding/mathematics might transfer to other
domains - this has yet to be demonstrated in practice.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE CAN'T JUST BUILD BIGGER AI DATACENTERS ANYMORE?
(6 MINUTE READ) [8]

AI's continued growth may ultimately hinge on a new kind of
supercomputer that spans entire countries. This will involve stitching
together existing datacenters to distribute the workload. The
infrastructure required to stitch datacenters together already exists,
but it is tuned more for disaster recovery and high-availability than large-scale AI training. Research is already underway to improve the technology, which will help address power challenges by allowing
datacenters in different regions to work as one.

¨

PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

FINALLY, AN AD SPOT TECHIES WON'T SKIP (SPONSOR) [9]

Tech inboxes are crowded, but TLDR stands outÄand so do the ads
inside. With over 5 million software devs, founders and other tech decision-makers tuning in daily, this is where ideas, tools, and
products get noticed. Learn more about advertising with TLDR. [9]

INTRODUCING SCOPEDB: MANAGE DATA IN PETABYTES FOR AN OBSERVABILITY
PLATFORM (12 MINUTE READ) [10]

ScopeDB is a database built on top of S3 that unleashes the power of
cloud elasticity and workload isolation. It achieves ten times
cost-efficiency and performance improvement compared to databases
built with shared-nothing architecture. ScopeDB servers use a single
stateless binary, so there is no need to manage local disks, data
sharding, or complex leader action. A demo playground to test out the
features of ScopeDB is available.

LAB (GITHUB REPO) [11]

Lab allows developers to experiment with code instantly without the
overhead of creating files and folders. Users can just type 'lab' with
any extension (eg. lab py) and start coding. It automatically
organizes experiments with smart names in a folder and cleans them up
after seven days to keep things tidy. A demo video is available.

¨

MISCELLANEOUS

THE SECRET SAUCE OF CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA APPS (8 MINUTE READ) [12]

In the days leading up to the deadline for TikTok to be banned in the
US, users flocked to other Chinese apps such as Xiaohongshu and
Lemon8. These apps have many of the same features that made TikTok so appealing: an infinite scroll of hyper-targeted recommendations and interactions with friendly strangers. They blend entertainment and
networking with sales to monetize their addictive algorithms. This
strategy has been very profitable, making China the global leader in
social commerce.

HERE ARE APPLE'S TWO MAIN PRIORITIES FOR AI THIS YEAR, PER LEAKED
MEMO (2 MINUTE READ) [13]

Apple has two main internal priorities for its AI efforts this year:
revamp Siri and improve its AI models. Siri is undergoing a big
transformation into 'LLM Siri', which will be shipping in the spring
of 2026, possibly in iOS 19.4. Apple's AI models have been criticized
for regularly including errors, so there is a clear need to improve
them. The company has temporarily disabled summaries in iOS 18.3 for
select app categories presumably until the backing AI model can be
brought up to par.

¨

QUICK LINKS

WORKSHOP: BUILD A TESTING CULTURE WITHOUT MICROMANAGING DEVELOPERS
(SPONSOR) [14]

Learn how to build a culture of testing and help your team succeed in
this livestream with Sentry and Growth Tribe. RSVP for this Tuesday.
[14]

ELON MUSK EMAIL TO X STAFF: `WE'RE BARELY BREAKING EVEN' (2 MINUTE
READ) [15]

Banks are preparing a coordinated move to sell some of the $13
billion in debt they loaned Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

PERPLEXITY AI REVISES TIKTOK MERGER PROPOSAL THAT COULD GIVE THE U.S. GOVERNMENT A 50% STAKE (4 MINUTE READ) [16]

Perplexity's proposal to merge with TikTok now allows for the US
government to own up to 50% of the new company upon a future IPO.

THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF UI AT GITHUB (15 MINUTE READ) [17]

This page contains the slides from Joel Hawksley's talk presented at
Boulder Ruby.

THE SHORT CASE FOR NVIDIA STOCK (72 MINUTE READ) [18]

DeepSeek's efficiency breakthrough suggests that the entire industry
has been massively over-provisioning compute resources.

2025 WILL LIKELY BE ANOTHER BRUTAL YEAR OF FAILED STARTUPS, DATA
SUGGESTS (5 MINUTE READ) [19]

More startups shut down last year than the year before - the trend is
expected to continue this year.

NO ONE IS DISRUPTING BANKS (13 MINUTE READ) [20]

Despite 30 years of trying, Fintech companies have still not
disrupted any of the big banks and have hardly challenged the key
banking model - taking deposits and issuing loans.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni [25] & Stephen Flanders [26]

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[5] https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/26/deepseek-gets-silicon-valley-talking/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[6] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/25/24351973/oracle-microsoft-tiktok-takeover-deal?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[7] https://www.seangoedecke.com/deepseek-r1/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/24/build_bigger_ai_datacenters/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[9] https://advertise.tldr.tech/?utm_source=tldr&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=secondary01272025
[10] https://www.scopedb.io/blog/manage-observability-data-in-petabytes?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[11] https://github.com/lugenx/lab?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[12] https://restofworld.org/2025/tiktok-algorithm-shopping-china/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feeds
[13] https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/24/apples-two-main-priorities-for-ai-this-year-per-leaked-memo/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[14] https://sentry.io/resources/build-testing-culture-workshop/?utm_source=tldr&utm_medium=paid-community&utm_campaign=codecov-fy25q4-testculture&utm_content=newsletter-testculture-rsvp
[15] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twitter-bank-debt-stagnant-growth?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[16] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/26/perplexity-tiktok-revised-merger-proposal.html?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[17] https://hawksley.org/2025/01/08/past-present-future-of-UI-at-github.html?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[18] https://youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com/blog/05_the_short_case_for_nvda?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[19] https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/26/2025-will-likely-be-another-brutal-year-of-failed-startups-data-suggests/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[20] https://www.popularfintech.com/p/no-one-is-disrupting-banks?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
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