Big Tech Unites for Open Source AI—and Against Anthropic

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, a big tech coalition throws its weight behind open weights models.
And before that, in the headlines, Nvidia also throws its weight behind Ilya Sutskever's safe super intelligence.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with Nvidia making a substantial investment in safe superintelligence, the enigmatic startup from former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Now, that's a name that hasn't come up on this show at least very much in years. Going back a bit, for those who haven't been here for as long, Ilya was one of the central figures in the OpenAI leadership dispute in late 2023 First, he was a major driver in deposing Sam, then he came back on board with Sam coming back to the CEO role. It was all very confused. When the dust had settled, he ended up leaving the company along with CTO Muramurati, both spinning off to found their own AI labs. As that was happening, the safe bet was on Ilya building something interesting and novel in the space. He was the scientist with a decades-long history in AI, completing his PhD under Jeffrey Hinton and pioneering the early work at OpenAI. Meanwhile, some investors openly scoffed during Murati's fundraising campaign, and yet, almost a few years later, Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has hired an all-star team of AI researchers and is at the center of this new trend of helping companies think about fine-tuning their own models. All of that happening while we haven't heard anything about what safe superintelligence is up to.
But then again, the actual mission statement of the company implied secrecy from the start. While Thinking Machines had a practical goal of building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals, that's their phrase, SSI's goal was much more narrow, with Ilya proposing a straight-shot research organization to produce safe superintelligence.
Indeed, what has been clear from the beginning with SSI is that Ilya was taking the position that the whole game is superintelligence, and that anything that you have to do for short-term commercial purposes on the way to superintelligence is ultimately just a distraction. So while yes, other companies have raised off $2 trillion valuations in the private markets based on billions in enterprise sales, Ilya's bet is that that is actually potentially a distraction from what is the ultimate mission, or at least what his ultimate mission is. Now, the actual news of this new deal between Nvidia and SSI is very brief. In a joint press release, Nvidia said that they had made a substantial investment in safe superintelligence without giving a number. The release also stated that SSI would receive access to Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips. SSI said that the deal would 10x their compute resources over the next 12 months. In the background, sources said that SSI had previously been relying on Google's TPUs, and Nvidia said that they made the investment after gaining rare access to SSI's technology. Jensen Huang commented, Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI. We're excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform. Now, SSI still looms very large in the space, and the announcements suggest the company is making progress. SSI commented, We reached the point where our research is worth scaling, and with this partnership, we will be able to.
Ilya himself chimed in, adding, Time to scale that SSI.
SSI co-founder Daniel Levy added, Deep learning happens when a small cracked team operates a big computer. The computer just got bigger. Now, one other Nvidia story, following up from the news that they were going to backstop an open AI facility, the circular AI financing narrative is back with a vengeance. Nvidia stock was down 4% on Monday, as people pointed to a new $3.25 trillion in deals that are for some just a little too circular for their tastes. The two deals include a partnership with SK Group, which will see the companies doing more than $500 billion in business with each other, as well as that $250 backstopping deal to help open AI construct a new data center. Indeed, we even got an update of that circular deal chart that was flying around all of late last year. So expect to see that little chestnut come back over the coming weeks. Still, when it comes to chips, Nvidia remains in a class of its own. That is perhaps why China is working so hard to change the equation. The Wall Street Journal reported that CCP operatives are pushing the adoption of domestic Chinese technology. Last summer, Huawei held a closed door meeting to give a demo of their latest generation of chips, showing apparently dramatic progress in catching up to Nvidia. That was enough to give the party the confidence to get more aggressive. According to the Wall Street Journal, China's AIs are, quote, ...delivered a blunt warning to China's largest AI users. Anyone who resisted employing domestic chips was a traitor. Now, the shift has been fairly dramatic. In 2021, prior to US export controls, China was 90% dependent on US chips. By 2025, that number fell to 60%, and Morgan Stanley believes it could fall to as low as 25% over the next five years. Huawei Deputy Chairman Eric Hsu was very clear on the cause, commenting, if the US hadn't forced our country, our company and our industry into a corner, we never would have done something like this. Now, to be clear, even though they've made progress, Huawei chips are still lagging significantly behind Nvidia. And that's primarily because progress has only accelerated in the West as well. Kyle Chan, a fellow at Brookings, said, it's like trying to catch up with a bullet train. Even with China's tech ecosystem focused on the problem, it's still a daunting challenge. And one of the biggest issues is simply throughput. China has been denied access to chip fabs made by ASML, the monopoly supplier for Taiwan and the West, and the only company able to manufacture cutting edge fabs. China's entire supply chain can produce around 28,000 advanced logic chips per month currently, a fraction of the output of TSMC. Still, that number is forecast to double each year for the next three years, according to Bernstein. Huawei alone expects to ship 1.5 million AI chips this year, roughly double their total for 2025 Still, Bernstein expects that in the chip race, China will continue to lag behind the US through at least 2030 The technological catch-up is happening quickly as well. On Monday, the information reported that a Shanghai-based company has begun mass-producing deep ultraviolet lithography machines, a key component in advanced fabs. This is the first time that China has had access to this technology that was previously kept from them under those export controls. Overall, all of this reporting highlights the extent to which China's technology base has been mobilized around this idea. Throughout the export control debates over recent years, there have broadly been two camps. Those who think the US interest is best served by restricting China's access to chips in hopes of slowing down their progress on AI models, and those who believe that a better strategy would be to flood the country with Nvidia chips, owning the tech stack and keeping China dependent on the US supply. It's clear now that that ship has sailed, China is developing their own chip economy, and they're doing so at a very rapid pace. Apple, meanwhile, is duking it out with Micron in a lobbying battle for Chinese chips. Last month, reports stated that Apple was lobbying the White House for approval to purchase memory chips from Chinese manufacturers, including CXMT. Their argument was that memory prices were completely out of control, and unless the administration wanted to see $5,000 iPhones, a solution needed to be found. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that US memory maker Micron has waded into the debate, lobbying the White House to keep restrictions in place. Micron is the only sizable US manufacturer of memory, with the rest of the large producers headquartered in Korea. Sanjay Murotra has reportedly warned that allowing Chinese manufacturers to enter the US could decimate the local industry, courting the same fate as the US steel and manufacturing industry. Now, technically, Apple doesn't need White House approval to access Chinese chips. The only restriction at the moment is the Pentagon entity list, which only limits the military supply chain. Then again, Apple does not want to go around the White House during this highly tense moment. Still, the Journal notes the conundrum for the Trump admin. They are currently facing down a rising inflation problem with the spike in memory prices hurting on the margins. The administration has also made it a clear priority to support and promote local chipmaking, allowing Chinese chips for the ubiquitous iPhone could undermine that agenda. Micron's solution is further assistance to fast track the construction of more domestic chip fabs. Beyond that, both Apple and Micron have worked hard to get in the president's good graces. A White House spokesperson shed no light on the situation, stating that the administration would pursue quote, investments and economic relief for the American people while safeguarding our national security.