Transcript
Jim Love (0:03)
The US Government closes a group described as the gold standard of IT improvement. China keeps releasing blockbuster AI despite or because of US Sanctions and one more Microsoft outage from a code update welcome back to trending. I'm your host Jim Love. Let's get into it Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has offered to back former employees of 18F, the government tech unit abrupt promptly dismantled by the General Services Administration, or GSA. Cuban's proposal came swiftly after the GSA's unexpected midnight decision to eliminate 18F, a team renowned for enhancing federal digital services. The group's announcement notes that when former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd took the position of director of Trump administration's technology services, or TTS, he met with all staff, including 18F on Feb. 3, but acknowledged that the group is the gold standard of civic technologists and that you guys have been doing this far longer than I've even been aware that your group exists. The group had an amazing list of accomplishments and some serious ongoing projects, including improving access to weather data, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, and supporting free tax filing with the irs, as well as other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels. Despite that, the group got the axe on the social platform. Bluesky Cuban addressed the laid off 18F staff. He said, if you worked for 18F and got fired group together and start a consulting company, it's just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably created. They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it, but on your terms. I'm happy to invest and or help now. The sudden termination of 18F has raised concerns about the future of government tech initiatives. Cuban's offer not only provides a lifeline to the displaced group, but also underscores the potential for private sector solutions to fill the void left by such abrupt policy shifts. And for the affected 18F professionals, this development presents an opportunity to continue their mission of improving public digital services, albeit from outside the government. But by forming a consulting firm with Cuban's backing, they could maintain their commitment to civic tech while operating with much greater autonomy and of course at consulting rates and not the much lower salaries of federal civil servants. And even according to one of the people who contributed to their post, they may have a new name for their group. They'll call it 18fu. Chinese AI innovator DeepSeek has open sourced its Fireflyer File System 3FS with a high performance parallel file system optimized for AI workloads. This move aligns with DeepSeq's strategy to enhance AI infrastructure efficiency and accessibility. Designed for AI high performance computing environments, 3FS prioritizes rapid random read operations crucial for training large language models. By minimizing read caching, which is often redundant in such scenarios, 3FS achieves impressive performance metrics in DeepSeq's Fireflyer 2 cluster, comprising 180 storage nodes, each equipped with 16 terabyte SSDs and high speed networking, 3FS delivered an aggregate read throughput that is roughly equivalent to 6.6 terabytes per second. This open source release is part of DeepSeek's broader initiative to democratize AI tools, enabling developers and enterprises to leverage advanced infrastructure without prohibitive costs. It's also a good poke in the eye to the US a high industry, and that's undoubtedly one of their reasons as well. The availability of 3Fs on platforms like GitHub facilitates its integration into diverse AI projects, potentially accelerating innovation across the sector. And if that were all they've done, this would be impressive. But concurrently, Deepseek is expediting the launch of its next generation AI Reasoning Model R2, originally slated for May. Building on the success of its predecessor R1, the R2 model aims to enhance coding capabilities and support multilingual reasoning, reflecting DeepSeek's commitment to advancing AI functionalities. Now, these developments coincide with other Chinese advancements in AI, including WAN 2.1. This is Alibaba's open source model, and it supports text effects in both Chinese and English, excelling at generating realistic visuals and leading the vbench leaderboard for video generative models. In addition, there are at least five other models coming out of China that show significant results in generating video. And if this weren't enough, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is warning that the new AI chips coming from China's Huawei present an existential threat to the U.S. chip industry. So so much for the U.S. s idea that they can use export restrictions to contain China as a competitor. And given the way that the US Is attacking its allies with tariffs, insults and sometimes with threats to their sovereignty, they may find that countries may be more than willing to embrace Chinese AI systems, which are often open source. There's reportedly a Chinese curse that goes May you live in interesting times. Well, things have gotten very interesting. On Saturday, March 1, 2025, a significant number of Microsoft 365 users experienced disruptions, particularly with Outlook, due to what was referred to as a problematic code change. The outage began around 4pm Eastern Time, with over 30,000 users reporting issues accessing services like Outlook Teams and Exchange. The disruptions were primarily concentrated in major US Cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. One report claimed that ultimately millions of users were impacted and Microsoft quickly identified the cause, stating, we've identified a potential cause of impact and have reverted the suspected code to alleviate impact. I think that means they fixed it. By approximately 7:00pm Eastern Time, the company confirmed that the services were largely restored following the rollback of the faulty code. This incident underscores the potential risks associated with deploying new code updates. Without comprehensive testing, businesses reliant on Microsoft services faced temporary disruptions, highlighting the importance of having contingency plans for such outages and for IT administrators. Now more than ever, you have to have a watchful eye when taking updates from Microsoft, especially when high availability is an issue. And for Microsoft, lessons learned are only good if you actually learn from the lesson. And that's our show. It's good to be back, although I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the time away. I'm your host, Jim Love. Have a wonderful Wednesday.