Latest / DX Today | No-Hype Podcast & News About AI & DX / AI News Today: DeepSeek's $15B Raise Shakes Up the AI Race

Transcript

AI News Today: DeepSeek's $15B Raise Shakes Up the AI Race · DX Today | No-Hype Podcast & News About AI & DX

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: It's Thursday, October 22nd, 2026.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_04: You're listening to the DX Today AI Daily Brief.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_04: Today, China's DeepSeek reportedly closes a$15 billion funding round.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_04: Meta posts a big revenue quarter as its Muse models take center stage.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_04: And OpenAI brings its frontier models to Google Cloud.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_04: Let's get into it.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan, roughly$15 billion according to Bloomberg News, which cited people familiar with the matter.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Tencent and the battery maker CATL are reported to be among the largest investors.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Reuters, which carried the report on Thursday, said it could not independently confirm the figure, and the round was described as still being finalized, so details could change.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The size is striking.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier this year, Deep Seek closed a first outside round of more than$7 billion, and reports earlier this month put the new raise at$12 billion or more.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: A raise of this scale would give DeepSeq far more money for computing power as it tries to keep pace with leading American labs, including OpenA Cheyenne Anthropic.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_04: A new war chest in Beijing.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: Meta reported third quarter revenue of$64.6 billion, up 26% from a year ago, beating Wall Street expectations.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Profit took a hit from a legal charge of nearly$10 billion.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Meta also announced a new class of non-voting shares, to be distributed as a dividend, which effectively works like a two-for-one stock split.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: On the earnings call, executives laid out how they plan to make money from Muse, the company's new family of AI models and assistant, which Meta says already has more than 10 million users, with shopping among the top activities.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Spending remains the open question for investors.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: Meta continues to pour money into AI data centers, and it declined to give a full revenue outlook for next year.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: The cloud map shifts.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: OpenAI is bringing its frontier models to Google Cloud.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: The companies announced on Wednesday that OpenAI models, including GPT-6 Astra, along with Codex for coding work, are coming to the model garden inside Google's Vertex AI platform.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: For now, the models are in private preview for select enterprise customers, with general availability planned in the coming weeks.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: The deal matters because OpenAI's cloud business has long been closely tied to Microsoft.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: Selling through Google lets OpenAI reach companies that have standardized on Google's cloud and lets those customers buy OpenAI, Google's own Gemini, and other models on a single bill.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: For Google, it adds the most widely known AI brand to a catalog that already holds more than 200 models.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: Now a new kind of assistant.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Anthropic has released a research preview of Claude Duet, a personal AI agent designed to work proactively rather than wait for instructions.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Duet is a standalone app for iPhone and Android.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it also runs on the web.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Access is by wait list for paying pro and max subscribers in the United States.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Anthropic says Duet is built around its Claude Opus 5.5 model, and it is meant to keep track of ongoing tasks, work on them in the background, and report back with updates.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: The launch puts Anthropic in direct competition with Meta's Muse and similar agent products from OpenAI, as the biggest labs race to move from chatbots that answer questions to software that handles errands and projects on a person's behalf.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_04: Banking feels the shift.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_05: Barclay says it will cut about 5,000 jobs, roughly 5% of its workforce, as it leans more heavily on artificial intelligence.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_05: The British bank disclosed the reductions alongside its third quarter results on Thursday, describing them as part of organizational simplification and technology-driven efficiency.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_05: The bank said the cuts are expected by the end of this year, and that about 1,000 roles have already gone.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_05: Reports say software developers are among the staff affected, a notable detail as banks use AI coding tools to write and test more of their own software.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_05: Barclays joins a growing list of large employers that now tie headcount reductions directly to AI, a trend that is drawing closer attention from regulators, unions, and economists.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_04: Robots on the line.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Tesla reported third quarter results on Wednesday, with adjusted earnings beating analysts' estimates, while revenue came in roughly flat.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: The bigger headline was robotics.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Tesla said early production of its Optimus humanoid robot has begun on a line at its factory in Fremont, California.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Elon Musk said he expects Tesla to reach 20,000 Optimus units per week by the end of next year, while also urging investors to temper expectations because the robots are complex to build.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Executives said robo taxis should become a significant part of revenue by the middle of next year.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Tesla is also spending heavily on AI computing and on a chip plant it is building with SpaceX.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Even so, shares slipped about 3% in after-hours trading.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: Big Blue reports in IBM posted third-quarter revenue of$17.1 billion, up 6% in constant currency, with operating earnings of$2.95 a share.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: Both figures came in ahead of Wall Street forecasts.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Growth was led by software and by the infrastructure unit, which includes IBM's mainframe systems.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Chief Executive Arvin Krishna pointed to demand from businesses for AI tools and for the data platforms that feed them, saying the quarter reinforced the strategic choices the company has made in recent years.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Investors were less enthusiastic.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: IBM shares slipped in extended trading after the report, a sign of how high expectations have become for companies selling AI products to large enterprises.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: A huge bet on research.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: Flapping Airplanes, an AI research lab that is only about a year old, has raised$1 billion.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: The company announced a Series A Round Co.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with Sequoia Capital also investing.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: Bloomberg reported that the round values the startup at$6 billion, a figure the company did not state itself.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: Flapping airplanes has not released a commercial product.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: Its pitch centers on finding far more efficient ways to train AI models, rather than simply scaling up computing power.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: The round is the latest example of investors writing very large checks to young research labs, betting that new technical approaches could challenge the established leaders before those labs have any revenue to show.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: Testing all that new code.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Blacksmith, a startup that helps software teams run and test their code faster, has raised$66 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of$1 billion.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Premgy Invest joined, along with existing backers, Peak 15 Partners, GV, and Y Combinator.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: The round brings total funding to$125 million.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Blacksmith raised its previous round at a valuation of$550 million, so its value has nearly doubled.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: The company says demand is rising because AI coding assistants are producing far more code, and all of it still has to be built and tested before it ships.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: The new money will go toward hiring and expanding its computing infrastructure.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_04: An AI-built model.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_05: A startup called Recursive has released its first model, Flint, an open-weight coding model that developers can download and run on their own machines.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_05: Flint is available for free on Hugging Face under the Apache license, which allows commercial use and modification.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_05: Recursive's stated goal is to build AI that can improve itself, and the company says Flint was built from scratch in under four months by a small team of people working alongside AI agents.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_05: That claim is the headline, and outside experts will want to test it.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_05: Running locally depends on the hardware, but a capable coding model that does not need a cloud connection is attractive to developers worried about cost, privacy, and keeping their source code in-house.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_04: Copilot at scale.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Microsoft says Volkswagen Group has now equipped more than 330,000 employees with Microsoft Copilot, one of the largest workplace AI rollouts announced so far.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Microsoft said on Wednesday that the car maker took a phased approach, starting with copilot chat before widening access to the full assistant.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: The announcement does not mean every worker uses the tool every day, but it shows how quickly large manufacturers are putting AI assistants in front of office staff.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: The rollout comes at a difficult moment for Volkswagen, which faces pressure on costs and reports of a proposed long-term pay freeze, and it gives Microsoft a major reference customer as it competes for corporate AI spending.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_04: Finally, letting agents shop.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: Walmart is opening its doors wider to AI shopping agents.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: The retailer announced Walmart Agent Gateway, a system for managing outside agents that shop on a customer's behalf at Walmart and Sam's Club, along with a feature called Agent Profiles.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Customers will be able to set spending limits for each agent and choose whether to approve every purchase or allow buying within a set budget.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Walmart said agent profiles will roll out next month.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: The move contrasts with rivals that have chosen to block outside agents from their stores.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: Walmart is betting that welcoming agents with guardrails will win more sales than fighting them, and that giving shoppers control will build the trust that agent shopping still lacks.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_04: For DX today, stay curious.