This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 1)

OpenAI in Talks to for New Funding at Up to $300 Billion Value Shirin Ghaffary, Rachel Metz, and Kate Clark | Bloomberg

“The ChatGPT maker is in discussions to raise funds at a pre-money valuation of $260 billion, said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. The post-money valuation would be $300 billion, assuming OpenAI raises the full amount. The company was valued at $157 billion in October.”

Cerebras Becomes the World’s Fastest Host for DeepSeek R1, Outpacing Nvidia GPUs by 57x Michael Nuñez | VentureBeat

“The AI chip startup will deploy a 70-billion-parameter version of DeepSeek-R1 running on its proprietary wafer-scale hardware, delivering 1,600 tokens per second —a dramatic improvement over traditional GPU implementations that have struggled with newer ‘reasoning’ AI models.'”

Stem Cells Used to Partially Repair Damaged Hearts John Timmer | Ars Technica

“Although the Nobel Prize for induced stem cells was handed out over a decade ago, the therapies have been slow to follow. In a new paper published in the journal Nature, however, a group of German researchers is now describing tests in primates of a method of repairing the heart using new muscle generated from stem cells.”

DeepSeek Mania Shakes AI Industry to Its Core Emanuel Maiberg | 404 Media

“If these new methods give DeepSeek great results with limited compute, the same methods will give OpenAI and other, more well-resourced AI companies even greater results on their huge training clusters, and it is possible that American companies will adapt to these new methods very quickly. Even if scaling laws really have hit the ceiling and giant training clusters don’t need to be that giant, there’s no reason I can see why other companies can’t be competitive under this new paradigm.”

Boom’s XB-1 Becomes First Civil Aircraft to Go Supersonic Sean O’Kane | TechCrunch

“It cleared Mach 1 and stayed supersonic for around four minutes, reaching Mach 1.1. Test pilot Tristan Brandenburg broke the sound barrier two more times before receiving the call to bring the XB-1 back to the Mojave Air & Space Port. The supersonic flight comes eight years after Boom first revealed the XB-1. It’s a small version of the 64-passenger airliner Boom eventually wants to build, which it calls Overture.”

Waymo to Test in 10 New Cities in 2025, Starting With Las Vegas and San Diego Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge

“This year, the theme is ‘generalizability’: how well the vehicles adapt to new cities after having driven tens of millions of miles in its core markets of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Ideally, the company is trying to get to a point where it can bring its vehicles to a new city and launch a robotaxi with a minimal amount of testing as a preamble.”

DeepSeek’s Safety Guardrails Failed Every Test Researchers Threw at Its AI Chatbot Matt Burgess | Wired

“[On Friday], security researchers from Cisco and the University of Pennsylvania [published] findings showing that, when tested with 50 malicious prompts designed to elicit toxic content, DeepSeek’s model did not detect or block a single one. In other words, the researchers say they were shocked to achieve a ‘100 percent attack success rate.'”

Useful Quantum Computing Is Inevitable—and Increasingly Imminent Peter Barrett | MIT Technology Review

“Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang jolted the stock market by saying that practical quantum computing is still 15 to 30 years away, at the same time suggesting those computers will need Nvidia GPUs in order to implement the necessary error correction. However, history shows that brilliant people are not immune to making mistakes. Huang’s predictions miss the mark, both on the timeline for useful quantum computing and on the role his company’s technology will play in that future.”

With Successful New Glenn Flight, Blue Origin May Finally Be Turning the Corner Eric Berger | Ars Technica

“‘I would say, “Stay tuned,”‘ [Bezos] said. ‘This is the very beginning of the Space Age. When the history is finally written hundreds of years from now, the 1960s will be a certain kind of beginning, and [there were] certainly incredible accomplishments. But now we’re really getting started. That was kind of pulled forward from its natural time, the space race with the Soviets. And now is the time when the real movement, the kind of golden age of space, is going to happen. It’s still absolutely day one.'”

JWST Shocks the World With Colliding Neutron Star Discovery Ethan Siegel | Big Think

“When we examined the remnant of [a 2017 neutron star collision] spectrally, we discovered an enormous number of heavy elements, indicating that the heaviest elements were likely produced by these cataclysms. In all the time since, we’ve never seen another such event directly, throwing the idea that neutron star collisions make the heaviest elements into doubt. But thanks to JWST, the idea is back on the table as our #1 option.”

Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations Anil Ananthaswamy | Quanta Magazine

“Scientists have had some successes pushing transformers past these limits, but those increasingly look like short-term fixes. If so, it means there are fundamental computational caps on the abilities of these forms of artificial intelligence—which may mean it’s time to consider other approaches.”