A month is a long time in the world of AI, so we thought we’d share some of the AI news highlights.
Deepseek
The big highlight has to be the emergence of Deepseek. Whether it builds on OpenAi and others, or whether it is entirely new is being wrangled over, but the key for us it efficiency. The story is that without access to the latest superchips, the Chinese developers had to make it run on older and slower processors – and they did! They also made it for a fraction of the cost. $US6Million reportedly. In contrast consider Microsoft who committed $80Bn for AI data centres in 2025, or the masive “The Stargate Project” (Open AI, Oracle, SoftBank from Japan, and MGX from the UAE are all behind it) which is a $500billion Texas-based initiative The big impact is the power consumption. Just a month we were being told that the projected growth in AI would overwhelm the ability to supply enough electricity to the AI data centres. It seems that constraint might be removed. It turns out that Deepseek had been around since 2023, headed by Liang Wenfeng who is an engineer from Hangzhou.
Bad Apple
Apple suspended its news summary feature after complaints that the AI-generated content included notifications that looked like they came from official news apps but included false information. Apple were slow to respond, initially saying they release an update that showed the summaries were AI-generated but they had to go further ad pause it altogether.
AI for Evil
We’ve also become aware this month of ‘GhostGPT’. This is an uncensored AI chatbot that is designed to conduct malicious actions like phishing scams and building malware. It has no censorship and no limits. If you ask it to write something bad, it will. Hackers don’t need much skill, they just ned to sign up, put their credit card in, and ask GhostGPT to do their evil bidding.
Can the UK be a global leader for AI?
That’s the intent of the ‘AI opportunities Action Plan’ launched in January by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, This is designed to lay down an etherical environment to foster AI. The question will be if it can capture the level of investment and innovation seen elsewhere, and, notwithstanding the DeepSeek breakthrough in China, it remains to be seen f the UK has sufficient electricity supply to power the AI they seek to build. They already have support from the likes of Vantage Data Centers and Kyndryl with commitments of $17 billion (£14 billion) and over 13,000 jobs.
The US wants that action too
In the US, outgoing President Joe Biden signed an order to address the huge energy needs of advanced AI data centres. It includes leasing federal land for gigawatt-scale data centres and power facilities.
Meta are also in AI trouble
Meta are being sued for training their ‘Llama’ engine with a dataset called ‘Library Genesis” (LibGen), a massive million+ archive collection of pirated books and articles.
Elon Musk
We’ve noted this as an aside in our newsletter, but it deserves more attention. Elon Musk’s AI bot, ‘Grok’, is now available as a standalone IOS app o your Apple devices, and its free. We understand that some of the same attitudes as we see on ‘X’ are also on Grok, so expect little respect for copyright and ready access to avatars that resemble public figures.