Shares of Chinese tech giant Baidu were trading up 10.7% in Asia on Tuesday, as investors appeared to react positively to the release of two new AI models over the weekend.  

Baidu released two new artificial intelligence models on Sunday, including the latest version of its foundational “Ernie” model and a new reasoning model that it said rivaled DeepSeek’s R1 model. CNBC is not able to verify these claims.

A reasoning model is a large language model designed to process complex problems in a similar way to humans, breaking prompts down into smaller pieces and considering multiple approaches before generating responses. 

According to Kai Wang, a senior equity analyst for Morningstar, the stock jump is likely a “delayed reaction” to the new models as Baidu vies to regain a leading position in China’s AI space. 

“The stock also hasn’t gotten as much love as the other hyperscalers but still it’s a platform that stands to benefit from greater AI demand since enterprises will need someone to help them with hosting, scaling, and computing power,” he said.

A hyperscaler refers to a major cloud computing company that provides massive data centers for computing storage and demands.

Baidu said on Sunday that its ERNIE X1 reasoning model “delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,” and has “stronger understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution capabilities.”

Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek upended the AI industry in January when it released its R1 open-source reasoning model, which rivaled models of American competitors, despite claims it was produced at a fraction of the cost and with far less powerful chips.

DeepSeek quickly overtook Baidu in China’s AI race, despite the company being one of the first in the market to launch a ChatGPT-like chatbot with its Ernie Bot, according to Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, who noted other tech giants like Alibaba and Bytedance have also pulled ahead.

“Baidu’s competitiveness hinges on whether its new models truly deliver on the promised performance and cost advantages,” Sun said, noting, however, that AI pricing, particularly in China’s market, is highly fluid.

Baidu’s latest models, similarly to DeepSeek’s R1, have been released as open-sourced, meaning the source code is freely available on the open web for possible modification and redistribution. 

This represents a change from Baidu’s prior strategy of focusing on proprietary models. 

“By open-sourcing its models, Baidu seeks to once again position its technology as an industry standard, strengthening its influence in the AI community and expand its market share,” said Sun.

Human resources software startup Rippling sued competitor Deel in federal district court on Monday, claiming that “Deel cultivated a spy” to orchestrate a trade-secret theft.

The employee met with Deel executives and passed internal Rippling records to a reporter, according to San Francisco-based Rippling’s complaint in the U.S. District Court for California’s Northern District.

Rippling claimed in the filing Deel violated the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and misappropriated trade secrets.

The two startups are among the most world’s most valuable. Investors valued Rippling at $13.5 billion in a funding round announced last year, while Deel told media outlets in 2023 that it was worth $12 billion. Deel ranked No. 28 on CNBC’s 2024 Disruptor 50 list.

“Weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia and seeding falsehoods about Deel, Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized claims,” a Deel spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “We deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims.”

Rippling confirmed its findings earlier this month. The company’s general counsel sent a letter to three Deel executives that referred to a new Slack channel, and the Deel spy quickly looked for it. Rippling subsequently served a court order to the spy at its office in Dublin, Ireland requiring him to preserve information on his mobile phone.

“Deel’s spy lied to the court-appointed solicitor about the location of his phone, and then locked himself in a bathroom — seemingly in order to delete evidence from his phone — all while the independent solicitor repeatedly warned him not to delete materials from his device and that his non-compliance was breaching a court order with penal endorsement,” Rippling said in Monday’s filing. “The spy responded: ‘I’m willing to take that risk.’ He then fled the premises.”

Rippling hired the person whom it calls the Deel spy for a management role in 2023, as the two companies were becoming more competitive, the filing says. Deel had used Rippling’s software, but Rippling opted to not renew Deel’s contract, according to the legal filing.

The spy repeatedly accessed information about Rippling customers, quotes, sales calls, demos and support requests in internal Slack repositories, according to the filing. He found and downloaded Rippling’s guidance on how to go up against Deel for prospective business, too, the filing says.

Then, in February, a reporter at The Information sent an inquiry to Rippling that included Slack messages from inside Rippling, which the startup concluded were collected by the Deel spy, the filing says. Additionally, email records suggest that the spy met with Deel executives in December, Rippling said in the complaint.

“We always prefer to win by building the best products and we don’t turn to the legal system lightly,” Parker Conrad, Rippling’s co-founder and CEO, said in a Monday X post. “But we are taking this extraordinary step to send a clear message that this type of misconduct has no place in our industry.”

This isn’t Conrad’s first legal entanglement over data access. In 2015, ADP dropped a defamation lawsuit that claimed his previous HR startup, Zenefits, had obtained information from clients in order to provide them with payment processing services.

WATCH: 2025 will be ‘year of reckoning’ for AI implementation: HR software firm

Each year 36 million trees fall due to decay, disease, natural disasters or clearing for new development. The vast majority of those trees are either burned, sent to a landfill or ground up for mulch, which wastes energy and causes carbon emissions. 

Now, new technology is being used to find, transport and recycle that wood and make it useful once again.

Cambium is a startup aiming to disrupt the wood recycling space. Its Baltimore-based researchers are working on new ways to track, treat and transfer old wood into the supply chain. It bills itself as the platform “where timber meets tech.”

“We make it really easy to source wood that would have otherwise been wasted and we build technology for the wood industry so that we can save material, create new local jobs and address climate change at scale,” said CEO Ben Christensen.

Every piece of Cambium’s “carbon smart” wood has a barcode. Scan it, and Cambium’s app will identify what the species is, when it was milled and what its grade is.

Cambium’s technology helps find, recycle and then deliver the wood across the United States and to parts of Canada. The company works with local tree care services, trucking companies and saw mills as well as companies like Amazon, CBRE, Gensler and Room and Board.

“We help truckers coordinate loads so they can actually move this material, and then we help sawmills source that material, track that material when they’re actually using it within their sawmill and then ultimately sell that material as well,” Christensen said.

While there are local wood recyclers, no one else is addressing the supply chain on a national scale, said Christensen, adding that he expects to eventually go global. This potential is enticing to investors.

“For us, as a venture capitalist who is looking to invest in businesses that kind of can go to the moon and become billion dollar businesses, this meets all the criteria,” said Adrian Fenty, founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital. 

Cambium is also backed by Volo Earth Ventures, NEA and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, among others. The startup has raised $28.5 million in total funding so far.

If it was possible to salvage all the discarded wood material in the U.S., humans could source about half of our total demand, Christensen said. 

Cambium doubled its sales last year, and Christensen said the big growth was on the software side. Its revenue comes from direct sales of wood to end users and from sales of software into the wood industry to facilitate moving, tracking and selling the recycled product.

“It’s critical for Silicon Valley investors, because we don’t want to invest in a wood company,” Fenty said. “We don’t want to invest in a construction company. We want to invest in a software company.”

Among the challenges ahead are the Trump administration’s tariffs on Canadian lumber, Christensen said. Those tariffs are expected to impact Cambium’s business, especially in the northeast region of the U.S.

“We’re moving material to sawmills that are 10 or 20 miles away across the border, and so obviously trade policy really impacts how that material moves,” Christensen said.

CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.