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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the TechMe Write Home for Thursday, April 17th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today OpenAI has a new reasoning model and another lower cost model as well. Is OpenAI about to acquire a coding startup? Is Perplexity turning to Samsung for distribution and branding? A neuralink rival gets FDA approval and why is Jensen Huang on a Code Red mission to China at the moment? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech more models, everybody OpenAI has launched O3, its most advanced AI reasoning model yet, as well as O4 mini, a lower cost alternative that still delivers, according to them, impressive results for ChatGPT paid users. Quoting Engadget a mere two days after announcing GPT 4,1, OpenAI is releasing not one but two new models. The company today announced the public availability of O3 and 04 minutes mini. Of the former, OpenAI says O3 is its most advanced reasoning model yet, with it showing strong performance in coding, math and science tasks. As for O3 mini, OpenAI is billing it as a lower cost alternative that still delivers impressive results across those same fields. More notably, both models offer novel capabilities not found in OpenAI's past systems. For the first time, the company's reasoning models can use and combine all of the tools available in ChatGPT, including web browsing and image generation. The company says this capability allows O3 and O4 mini to solve challenging multi step problems more effectively and take real steps toward acting independently. At the same time, O3 and O4 mini can not just see images, but also interpret and think about them in a way that significantly extends their visual processing capabilities. For instance, you can upload images of whiteboards, diagrams or sketches, even poor quality ones, and the new models will understand them. They can also adjust the images as part of how they reason. The combined power of state of the art reasoning with full tool access translates into significantly stronger performance across academic benchmarks and real world tasks, setting a new standard in both intelligence and usefulness, says OpenAI. Separately, OpenAI is releasing a new coding agent a la Claude code named Codex cli. It's designed to give developers a minimal interface they can use to link OpenAI's models with their local code out of the box. It works with OTH 3 and 04 mini, with support for GPT 4.1 on the way. Yes, on that coding agent. Quoting TechCrunch, Codex CLI appears to be a small step in the direction of OpenAI's broader agentic coding vision. Recently, the company's CFO Sarah Fryer described what she called the Agentic Software Engineer, a set of tools OpenAI intends to build that can take a project description for an app and effectively create it, and even quality assurance test it. Codec CLI won't go that far, but it will integrate OpenAI's models, eventually including O3 and O4, many with the clients that process code and computer commands, otherwise known as command line interfaces. It's also open source, OpenAI says. In a blog post provided to TechCrunch, OpenAI added, you can get the benefits of multimodal reasoning from the command line by passing screenshots or low fidelity sketches to the model, combined with access to your code locally via codec CLI. To spur use of codec CLI, OpenAI plans to dole out $1 million in API grants to eligible software development projects. The company says it'll award $25,000 blocks of API credits to the projects chosen. But let's get back to O3 and the fact that it is a reasoning model. Dan Shipper at every wrote up a summary of his experiences with it, and while I encourage you to read his entire thing to get a sense of the different ways he used it, I'm just going to read from his conclusion here. Quote this is the biggest wow moment I've had with a new OpenAI model since GPT4. The company has successfully lengthened the leash that an AI gets in order to do its tasks. Now you can reliably let it work for minutes at a time to get higher quality answers with no intervention. But what makes O3 especially powerful is the integration between the model and ChatGPT. It has tools like web search, reminders, memories and code interpreter that allow users to access more of its power with less hassle. This is a very valuable strategic position for OpenAI to be in, one one that will further its lead as the destination chatbot of choice for this AI era. O3 is also a lesson in the seasons of change that companies go through. For about a year after Sam Altman's firing, OpenAI was slow to release new products and analysts were prognosticating about its downfall. With this release stacked on its Deep Research and GPT 4.5 recently, OpenAI is back on a tear, end quote. Sticking with OpenAI for a second, Bloomberg says OpenAI is in talks to acquire Windsurf, an AI coding tool formerly known as Codium, for around $3 billion. Windsurf was valued at $1.25 billion in a 2024 funding round, so we know that coding AI is the new hotness and OpenAI has been moving to plant their flag in this arena. But what does this startup have that OpenAI doesn't think they can build on their own? Quoting from Bloomberg the deal would be OpenAI's largest acquisition to date and could help the company take on rising competition in the market for AI driven coding assistance systems capable of tasks like writing code based on natural language, prompting Windsurf, formerly called Exafunction, had recently been in talks with investors including Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst to raise funding at a $3 billion valuation. The company was valued at $1.25 billion and a by General Catalysts last year. If the deal closes, OpenAI would compete more directly with companies like anthropic, Microsoft owned GitHub and AnySphere, which offer services in the fast growing field of AI coding. The deal would also be a signal that as more companies pile into the sector, the number of mergers and acquisitions will rise. OpenAI has acquired other startups before, including Vector database company Rockset and Multi, a remote collaboration platform. Investors have recently been enthusiastically backing AI coding tools, including AnySphere, the startup behind Cursor, which was in talks with investors to raise money at a valuation of almost $10 billion earlier this year. End quote. Three interesting tweets on this. First quoting Austin Allred if OpenAI buys windsurf, does it get data as to all of the input prompts and then outputs for all of the different models? I think it might and you'd be able to see whether the output is accepted or rejected. End quote. Then Zach Weinberg I'm sure everyone deep in the industry already knew this, but very clear the core model companies realize they need to own the customer application layer to actually make money. Tons of M and A likely coming to fight for the most mature application layer companies in the biggest categories coding, marketing, maybe customer service will be very tough to compete with the OpenAI or Google or Microsoft Application bundle in the long run. Then at semianalysis, Cursor and Anthropic had a mutually beneficial relationship but lacked realize controlling the main application of a model is as valuable as owning the model itself. With this acquisition, OpenAI gains greater ecosystem control and can build better products. End quote. The race is real folks. Bloomberg sources say Perplexity is in discussions to integrate its AI assistant on Samsung's devices and has reached an agreement to preload Perplexity on Motorola's phones. The details of the Samsung deal are still being hashed out. The people said the terms could involve offering Perplexity as a default AI assistant option or Preloading the startup's Android app on phones. Samsung, the world smartphone market leader, also could promote the assistant heavily as an option within the Galaxy Store, where users download apps. A deal with Perplexity is complicated by Samsung's wide ranging partnership with Alphabet, which powers many of the AI features on Samsung devices and provides the default search engine. But Samsung has been fostering a relationship with Perplexity for months. The South Korea based company's investment arm, called Next, backed the startup last year. Samsung is discussing making another investment in Perplexity in the near future, the people said. The startup has been in broader talks with investors for a new round of funding, which would double its valuation to $18 billion. It has discussed raising between 500 million dol million and $1 billion, Bloomberg News reported in March. Founded in 2022, perplexity has gained popularity for real time results and search engine like user interfaces. The assistant has the ability to service in depth research, and Perplexity can tap into models beyond its own, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. The Motorola deal will include Perplexity being preloaded as an alternative assistant to Google's Gemini. There will also be a tailored user interface for Motorola's updated Razer foldable phones, and marketing from the device maker will encourage customers to try Perplexity. Today, Motorola offers its own homegrown AI system and access to Google Gemini. Samsung takes a similar approach, providing its Bixby service alongside Google's AI platform. For San Francisco based Perplexity, securing Motorola and Samsung deals would be a major boon to building its brand and gaining popularity in the US where ChatGPT and Gemini are more established. While Motorola's market share is slim in the smartphone industry, the company is making strides. Samsung, for its part, has a share of about 20% globally, according to data from IDC.
- [10:00]
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Brian McCullough
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Brian McCullough
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- [11:00]
Brian McCullough
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- [11:01]
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- [12:40]
Brian McCullough
The U.S. food and Drug Administration has cleared Neuralink rival Precision Neuroscience to offer a less invasive brain implant. Quoting Bloomberg, one of the co founders of Elon Musk's Neuralink Corp. Is building a different kind of brain implant. That device, made by the startup Precision Neuroscience Corp. Went in 63 year old Tim Fisher earlier this month. In an operating room in Philadelphia, a surgeon placed a sliver of film, thinner than a human hair and embedded with over 1,000 electrodes on Fisher's brain. After a little training, when Fisher moved his left hand, so did a nearby robotic appendage guided by signals from his brain and the new brain patch. It was an amazing experience, said Fisher, a retail worker who lives in Westchester, Pennsylvania and has Parkinson's disease. He said he's drawn to these kinds of implants because his tremors make everyday tasks like typing or opening a jar near impost. The brain device that Fisher used was cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration late last month for limited uses, bringing Precision one step closer to a commercially available technology that one day might allow people to control computers or other devices with just their thoughts. That could help people with paralysis electronically communicate with others, use computer software and get a job. The device is already being used to help doctors map brain activity in more detail to plan procedures, and could also enable researchers to study the brain more closely and accurately. Precision was started in 2021 by Michael Mag and Benjamin Rapoport, a brain surgeon who previously helped co found neuralink. In contrast with some other experimental systems like neuralinks, which stick into the brain tissue, Precision's strip is designed to sit on top, Rapoport said. The idea is to build something that can be inserted and removed without leaving a trace on the brain. Fischer's patch, for instance, was only in place temporarily during the procedure. Around the size of a US postage stamp, the Precision device contains 1,024 tiny metal electrodes that are each a fraction of a millimeter in diameter. It's been studied, and at least 37 patients across five medical centers and about 1/3 of US medical centers that do major brain surgeries have expressed interest in it, according to the company. We've been amazed by the demand for it, rappaport said. The strip was greenlit by the FDA to record, monitor and stimulate brain activity and can be used for less than 30 days. The regulator cleared the device based on a submission that included testing, but not the human studies. At least One other company, BlackRock Neurotech, has received a similar clearance for its Neuroport array device. I know, I know, I promise not to do this, but tech stocks were down significantly yesterday. What's worrying people now? Well, that's what I want to talk about. It's about that wrinkle around chips and tariffs and export controls, but also specifically about Nvidia. All the big chip players AMD, Nvidia and ASML were down 7% yesterday and and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang apparently arrived in China yesterday and visited Beijing today, a source says, to meet officials to discuss Trump's new chip export rules, quoting the ft, according to two people familiar with his travel schedule. Huang met Nvidia clients, including the founder of generative artificial intelligence startup Deepseek, to discuss new chip designs for Chinese customers. He then held separate talks with Chinese Premier He Laifeng, according to one person familiar with the meeting. Huang said China was a very important market for Nvidia and expressed hope that his company could continue cooperating with the country, according to state broadcaster CCTV. On Tuesday, Nvidia said it expected a $5.5 billion hit to earnings from new U.S. export restrictions on its H20 chip, a lower powered model that had already been designed to comply with Joe Biden era controls limiting exports to China. Huang's talks indicate that Nvidia is not willing to give up on the Chinese market and is considering designing yet another chip for it, even though its previous efforts have been banned by WAS Washington. Plans for the Nvidia chief's visit to Beijing were finalized after US President Donald Trump's unexpected move to ban the H20 chip. Nvidia reported $17 billion in sales from China last year, but faced growing threats to its business from Beijing even before Trump interceded. In a separate Financial Times piece, they report that Nvidia is hustling now because they were actually caught flat footed after a meeting with Trump at his Florida residence at Mar? A Lago earlier this month. Nvidia executives were left with the impression they could escape tougher enforcement of any curbs, the people said, adding the company's plan to invest $500 billion in the US had also impressed the president. This led Nvidia to tell Chinese clients, including tech giants Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent, that orders of H20s would not be affected, the people said. Nvidia was then blindsided as Trump decided to clamp down on the export of H20, a product that Chinese tech groups have relied upon their efforts to challenge their global peers to develop large language models. Frustrated Chinese tech companies have complained about not having enough warning about such a major policy change, but are understanding that the shift is beyond the control of Nvidia, according to the people with knowledge of recent discussions. AI demand jumped in China after Deepseek's successful launch of its low Cost Reasoning model led local companies to put almost $17 billion in orders for H20 chips this year, according to one of the people. While Nvidia Nvidia typically takes more than six months to deliver such chips, most of this year's orders from its Chinese clients are yet to be filled and will probably be affected by the latest U.S. restrictions. The $5.5 billion hit to earnings Nvidia announced are mostly the cost of materials to be used to produce such orders, and related penalties and operational costs for not delivering. Based on agreed terms, the actual affected revenue from China could be more than $10 billion, the person estimated. China's tech giants are racing to find a replacement to the H20, while Trump's new export controls could significant the sales of domestic manufacturers led by Huawei, which has been pushing to produce more AI processors. It also remains unclear how Chinese groups can apply for a license to obtain H20s and on what basis they would be issued. Intel told its Chinese clients last week that chips would require a license for exporting to China if they have a total DRAM bandwidth of 1400 gigabytes per second or more, I O bandwidth of 1100 gigabytes per second or more, or a total of both of 1700 gigabytes per second or more, according to a company email. Intel's Gaudi series as well as Nvidia's H20 far exceed these requirements. So yeah, sounds like Jensen is on a code Red mission. As soon as I hit publish on this, we are going to take a tour of the Stanley Hotel, which is what the hotel and the Shining is based on. Apparently Stephen King came here in the 70s right when the Stanley was shutting down for the season and boom, inspiration for the Shining after he visited the hotel bar and met with the bartender whose name, coincidentally, was Lloyd. Talk to you tomorrow.