China's DeepSeek Releases AI Model Upgrade, Intensifies Rivalry with OpenAI

The DeepSeek logo is seen at the offices of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province on February 5, 2025. (AFP)
The DeepSeek logo is seen at the offices of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province on February 5, 2025. (AFP)
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China's DeepSeek Releases AI Model Upgrade, Intensifies Rivalry with OpenAI

The DeepSeek logo is seen at the offices of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province on February 5, 2025. (AFP)
The DeepSeek logo is seen at the offices of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province on February 5, 2025. (AFP)

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released a major upgrade to its V3 large language model, intensifying competition with US tech leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The new model, DeepSeek-V3-0324, was made available through AI development platform Hugging Face, marking the company's latest push to establish itself in the rapidly evolving AI market, Reuters said.
The latest model demonstrates significant improvements in areas such as reasoning and coding capabilities compared to its predecessor, with benchmark tests showing enhanced performance across multiple technical metrics published on Hugging Face.
DeepSeek has rapidly emerged as a notable player in the global AI landscape in recent months, releasing a series of models that compete with Western counterparts while offering lower operational costs.
The company launched its V3 model in December, followed by the release of its R1 model in January.



WhatsApp to Start Showing Ads to Users in Some Parts of the Messaging App

A WhatsApp icon is displayed on an iPhone, Nov. 15, 2018, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. (AP)
A WhatsApp icon is displayed on an iPhone, Nov. 15, 2018, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. (AP)
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WhatsApp to Start Showing Ads to Users in Some Parts of the Messaging App

A WhatsApp icon is displayed on an iPhone, Nov. 15, 2018, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. (AP)
A WhatsApp icon is displayed on an iPhone, Nov. 15, 2018, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. (AP)

WhatsApp said Monday that users will start seeing ads in some parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people that use the messaging service.

Advertisements will be shown only in the app's Updates tab, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day. However, they won't appear where personal chats are located, developers said.

"The personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn’t changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads," WhatsApp said in a blog post.

It’s a big change for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton vowed to keep the platform free of ads when they created it in 2009.

Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and the pair left a few years later. Parent company Meta has long been trying to generate revenue from WhatsApp.

WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like the user's age, the country or city where they're located, the language they're using, the channels they're following in the app, and how they're interacting with the ads they see.

WhatsApp said it won't use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user.

It's one of three advertising features that WhatsApp unveiled on Monday as it tries to monetize the app's user base. Channels will also be able to charge users a monthly fee for subscriptions so they can get exclusive updates. And business owners will be able to pay to promote their channel's visibility to new users.