7/7: Chinese Chips
DeepSeek and Z.ai make their own chips, Meta releases Muse Image and Video, Fable access extended through the weekend, Samsung begins mass producing for Vera Rubin
Happy Tuesday, monitors. It could be happier, but unfortunately last night Belgium eliminated Team USA from the World Cup in a 4-1 blowout. Our offense and defense just weren’t there, and were it not for another miraculous penalty kick from Malik Tillman we wouldn’t have gotten any goals at all. At least Messi made up for it this morning with a last-minute 3-2 victory over Egypt. If you want to Monitor The Soccer (and yes, also the Singularity), be sure to catch us on X and YouTube, and join our Discord to chat with our hosts live.
Today’s Experts
Christian Keil (a16z American Dynamism) on SpaceX
Ketan Ramakrishnan (Yale Law School) on AI regulation and tort law
Qiaochu Yuan on J-spaces and AI consciousness
Thomas Woodside (Secure AI Project) on Illinois’ AI Safety Measures Act
Leo-Pierre Trudel (Aurelion Research) on Chinese AI restrictions
Rui Ma (Tech Buzz China) on Chinese AI restrictions
Will Brown (Prime Intellect) on AI research
Anush Elangovan (AMD) on AMD and agentic coding
Making Sense of the World
Chinese AI labs are refocusing on domestic chips. Chinese companies currently rely on a mix of smuggled Nvidia chips, legal export-controlled versions of American chips like Nvidia’s H20 and A800 and AMD’s MI308, and Chinese chips like the Huawei Ascend, Hygon DCU, and Cambricon MLU/Siyuan. Due to tensions with the US and mandates (and funding) from the Chinese government to encourage the domestic chip ecosystem, Chinese companies are reallocating their budgets toward local chips.
DeepSeek and Z.ai will make their own chips. AI demand continues to skyrocket, and compute capacity continues to be hard to come by, especially in China where US chips are export-controlled. Labs also like to have their own chips in order to reduce dependence on external compute suppliers (like Nvidia or Huawei) and make optimizations for their specific stack. OpenAI just announced their Jalapeño chip in collaboration with Broadcom, and Anthropic is rumored to be working on a chip with Samsung.
Meta releases Muse Image and announces Muse Video, the first image and video model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. They seem like strong models — Muse Image ranks second on Arena’s leaderboard behind just GPT Images 2.0, and Muse Video is behind only Gemini Omni Flash and Seedance 2.0. Teortaxes points out that the underlying model is strong enough to replicate a QR code without information loss. MSL’s most recent language model release was Muse Spark three months ago.
Claude Fable access in paid Claude plans is extended to July 12. Claude Pro, Max, and Team users can use Fable 5 as part of their plan up to 50% usage until end of day Sunday. This promotion was supposed to end today (July 7). Afterwards, users will have to pay $10/$50 per million input/output tokens.
Mercor hits $2 billion ARR. The company pays contractors with specific domain knowledge to create specific training data for frontier labs, supplementing the general training corpus of the Internet. 60-70% of Mercor’s revenue is paid out to contractors, and the company is cash flow positive.
Four US states are suing Meta for $1.4 trillion. Yes, trillion with a T. Colorado, California, Kentucky, and New Jersey allege that the company deliberately designed its products to addict minors and misled the public about their safety. Populist and government backlash against both real and perceived abuses of Big Tech continues to grow.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opposes autonomous weapons. He called for them to be “banned by international law”, labeled them “morally repugnant”, and insisted that “some decisions must remain forever human.” In the long run, however, militaries that refuse the adoption of autonomous weapons for moral reasons may be at a permanent structural disadvantage.
Samsung begins mass producing storage for Nvidia Vera Rubin. Vera Rubin, Nvidia’s latest hardware generation after Blackwell, is undergoing mass production and is scheduled to release within months. Samsung has begun production of the PM1763 enterprise solid-state drive to provide storage for Vera Rubin datacenter systems.
Amazon is selling $25B in bonds in order to help fund its hyperscale AI infrastructure buildout.
Microsoft is replacing OpenAI and Anthropic models with Microsoft AI models in some products like Excel and Outlook in order to cut costs.
Banger Review
