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Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek roiled markets in January, setting off a massive tech and semiconductor selloff after unveiling AI models that it said were cheaper and more efficient than American ones. 

But the underlying fears and breakthroughs that sparked the selling go much deeper than one AI startup. Silicon Valley is now reckoning with a technique in AI development called distillation, one that could upend the AI leaderboard. 

Distillation is a process of extracting knowledge from a larger AI model to create a smaller one. It can allow a small team with virtually no resources to make an advanced model.

A leading tech company invests years and millions of dollars developing a top-tier model from scratch. Then a smaller team such as DeepSeek swoops in and trains its own, more specialized model by asking the larger “teacher” model questions. The process creates a new model that’s nearly as capable as the big company’s model but trains more quickly and efficiently. 

“This distillation technique is just so extremely powerful and so extremely cheap, and it’s just available to anyone,” said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, adding that he expects to see innovation when it comes to how large language models, or LLMs, are built. “We’re going to see so much competition for LLMs. That’s what’s going to happen in this new era we’re entering.” 

Distillation is now enabling less-capitalized startups and research labs to compete at the cutting edge faster than ever before.

Using this technique, researchers at Berkeley said, they recreated OpenAI’s reasoning model for $450 in 19 hours last month. Soon after, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington created their own reasoning model in just 26 minutes, using less than $50 in compute credits, they said. The startup Hugging Face recreated OpenAI’s newest and flashiest feature, Deep Research, as a 24-hour coding challenge. 

DeepSeek didn’t invent distillation, but it woke up the AI world to its disruptive potential. It also ushered in the rise of a new open-source order — a belief that transparency and accessibility drive innovation faster than closed-door research.

“Open source always wins in the tech industry,” said Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, which makes an AI-powered search engine for enterprises. “You cannot beat the momentum that a successful open-source project is able to actually generate.” 

OpenAI itself has walked back its closed-source strategy in the wake of DeepSeek’s accomplishment.

“Personally I think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on Reddit on Jan. 31. 

The combination of distillation’s newfound traction and open source’s rise in popularity is completely altering the competitive dynamics in AI. 

Watch the video to learn more.

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AI startup Cursor raises $2.3 billion funding round at $29.3 billion valuation

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AI startup Cursor raises .3 billion funding round at .3 billion valuation

Emilija Manevska | Moment | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence startup Cursor on Thursday announced it has closed a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation, nearly triple what it was worth as of its last raise in June.

Tune in at 4:30 p.m. ET as Cursor CEO Michael Truell joins “Closing Bell: Overtime” to discuss the funding round. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.

Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code. Its parent company, Anysphere, is an applied research lab that was founded in 2022.

Cursor is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines, that are valued at over $10 billion.

Investors including Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Coatue, Nvidia and Google participated in its latest funding round, according to a blog post.

“This funding will allow us to invest deeply in our research and build Cursor’s next magical moments,” Cursor said.

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Since the tool first launched in 2023, Cursor said it has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and swelled to more than 300 employees.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the company his “favorite enterprise AI service” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October.

The company said its in-house models generate more code than “almost” any other large language models in the world.

The coding tool market has grown more crowded in recent months as it’s proved to be a lucrative AI use case. Cursor competes with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cognition, which acquired the AI coding startup Windsurf in July.

OpenAI approached Anysphere earlier this year about potentially purchasing Cursor, but the deal failed to gain traction, as CNBC previously reported. OpenAI was also briefly in talks to acquire Windsurf before ultimately introducing its own coding tool called Codex in May.

In September, Anthropic said its coding tool Claude Code has already generated more than $500 million in run-rate revenue for the company since its full launch in May. As of July, Windsurf was generating $82 million in annual recurring revenue, Cognition said in a blog post at the time.

“Internally, we often talk about how high the ceiling is for how great Cursor can become, and how much work still remains to get there,” Cursor said.

WATCH: Every engineer is being turbocharged by AI, says Macroscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour

Every engineer is being turbocharged by AI, says Macroscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour

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Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini says the board ‘needed to act’ to revive company

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Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini says the board 'needed to act' to revive company

Mark Bertolini on new role as Verizon chairman: Losing 30% share over the last 8 years is an issue

Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini said Thursday that the company’s new CEO, former PayPal boss Dan Schulman, is working to revive Verizon from its period of share losses under former CEO Hans Vestberg.

Bertolini, who is also the Oscar Health CEO and who was named Verizon chairman last month, told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” that the company needs to “do something different” as it undergoes its leadership change.

“Verizon has gone from number one in market cap, bond ratings and market share to number three. And the network isn’t as differentiated as it used to be, in large part because everybody’s been spending money to put these 5G networks in place,” Bertolini said. “So losing 30% share over the last eight years is an issue, and we have to do something different.”

In October, the company announced Schulman would be replacing Vestberg, who had led the company since 2018. In a statement at the time, Schulman said Verizon was at a “critical juncture” and that he believed the company had a “clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory.”

Schulman previously led PayPal through significant revenue growth and has served on Verizon’s board of directors since 2018.

Vestberg is remaining on the the board of directors until the 2026 annual meeting and serving as a special advisor through Oct. 4, 2026.

Bertolini said Thursday that Schulman is evaluating underlying cost structures and other aspects of the company to ensure its success.

“We believe that once we have that plan in place, we’ll have a good story,” Bertolini said. “The Street reacted early on that there’s going to be a price war; I think it’s less about price war than the value of what we’re offering to people through the product.”

Bertolini added that Schulman will be revealing his plan for turning around the company “sooner rather than later.”

“The board needed to act, and we acted,” Bertolini said.

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Musk’s xAI raises $15 billion in latest funding round

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Musk's xAI raises  billion in latest funding round

Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s artificial intelligence company xAI has raised $15 billion from investors, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.

The funding adds another $5 billion to the $10 billion round CNBC reported on in September that valued the startup at $200 billion. Sources told CNBC that a lot of the money will fund graphic processing units that underpin large language models.

Artificial intelligence startups have reached sky high valuations in recent months as they raise massive amounts of capital to power seemingly endless demand for foundational models.

In September, AI startup Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round that roughly tripled its valuation from March. Sam Altman’s OpenAI in October closed a $6.6 billion share sale at a $500 billion valuation.

Last last week, Tesla shareholders voted to approve Musk’s massive pay package worth nearly $1 trillion, and voted on a proposal for the company to invest in xAI.

Brandon Ehrhart, general counsel at Tesla, said there were more votes for than against, but noted the abstentions and said the company is considering next steps on the issue.

This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.

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