Nvidia reported that its revenue soared 94% above last year's number and profit increased by 106% during the three months that ended in October. The New York Times has more here. 

xAI, a two-year-old San Francisco startup founded by Elon Musk that competes with OpenAI, has reportedly raised $5 billion at a $50 billion post-money valuation. Investors include Qatar Investment Authority, Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. The company has raised a total of $11 billion. The Wall Street Journal has the scoop here.

In a 23-page document filed late today, the DOJ asked a federal judge to break up Google -- including calling for a sale of its Chrome web browser -- to keep it from continuing to squash rivals. TechCrunch has more here.

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By Kyle Wiggers

A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to rival OpenAI’s o1.

On Wednesday, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, which the firm claims is a reasoning model competitive with o1.

Unlike most models, reasoning models effectively fact-check themselves by spending more time considering a question or query. This helps them avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models.

Similar to o1, DeepSeek-R1 reasons through tasks, planning ahead, and performing a series of actions that help the model arrive at an answer. This can take a while. Like o1, depending on the complexity of the question, DeepSeek-R1 might “think” for tens of seconds before answering.

DeepSeek claims that DeepSeek-R1 (or DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview, to be precise) performs on par with OpenAI’s o1-preview model on two popular AI benchmarks, AIME and MATH. AIME uses other AI models to evaluate a model’s performance, while MATH is a collection of word problems. But the model isn’t perfect. Some commentators on X noted that DeepSeek-R1 struggles with tic-tac-toe and other logic problems (as does o1).

More here.

Cyera, a four-year-old New York and Israeli startup that enables organizations to understand where their sensitive data is stored, who has access to it, and how to secure it effectively, raised a $300 million Series D round at a $3 billion valuation. The co-leads were Accel and Sapphire Ventures, with additional participation from Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Coatue, and Georgian. CTech has more here.

Odoo, a 23-year-old Belgian company that develops open-source enterprise resource planning software and competes with SAP, sold $527 million worth of shares to CapitalG and Sequoia in a secondary transaction that values the company at $5.3 billion. TechCrunch has more here. 

Spectro Cloud, a six-year-old startup based in San Jose, CA, whose product is designed to simplify the deployment, scaling, and maintenance of Kubernetes clusters, raised a $75 million Series C round at a $750 million post-money valuation. Goldman Sachs Alternatives was the deal lead. The company has raised a total of $160 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Tekever, a twenty-four-year-old Lisbon company that develops drones equipped with artificial intelligence for surveillance and data collection, raised a $73.7 million round. Baillie Gifford and the NATO Innovation Fund co-led the deal, with additional support from the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Crescent Cove Advisors, Iberis Semper, and Cedrus Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Tokamak Energy, a 16-year-old UK startup that is developing compact nuclear fusion reactors using high-temperature superconducting magnets to contain and control superheated plasma, raised a $125 million round led by East X Ventures and Lingotto Investment Management (an Agnelli family fund), with participation from British Patient Capital, BW Group, Furukawa Electric Company, and Sabanci Climate Ventures. TechCrunch has more here.