China quietly punches back at OpenAI

PLUS: Opera Neon runs AI directly on your device instead of the cloud, keeping your browsing completely private

Author

Jason Nguyen
May 29, 2025

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. DeepSeek just quietly released an upgraded R1 reasoning model that ranks directly behind OpenAI's latest offerings on coding benchmarks, demonstrating China's continued ability to match Silicon Valley's AI advances.

With international AI competition intensifying at this pace, are we heading toward a multipolar AI landscape where no single country dominates?

In Today’s AI Daily:

  • Telegram scores $300M for billion-user Grok deal

  • Opera debuts privacy-first local AI browser

  • DeepSeek quietly upgrades to rival OpenAI

  • 5 new AI tools & prompts

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPERA

Image source: Opera

The AI Daily: Opera just announced Opera Neon, the first browser designed to run AI on your device instead of the cloud, helping protect your privacy while still offering smart features.

Key details:

  • Uses webpage code (DOM tree) instead of screen recordings or cloud servers, making it faster and safer.

  • AI runs directly in the browser, so your history, logins, and cookies stay private and local.

  • Includes smart tools that fix their own errors and install needed software when building things like games.

  • Only uses European servers when using the “Make” feature to build apps or content.

  • Based on years of Opera’s own AI tech, now offered as a full browser experience.

Why it matters: Most AI tools use the cloud and collect data, but Opera’s local-first design gives users more privacy. As people care more about how their data is used, this could set Opera apart in the growing AI browser market.

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DEEPSEEK

The AI Daily: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek just updated its powerful R1 reasoning model on Hugging Face, showing it can still compete with top U.S. AI companies like OpenAI.

Key details:

  • DeepSeek launched R1-0528 as a "minor trial upgrade" with no official announcement.

  • The model ranks just behind OpenAI's o4 mini and o3 on coding benchmarks.

  • Outperforms xAI's Grok 3 mini and Alibaba's Qwen 3 on LiveCodeBench leaderboard.

  • Features 685 billion parameters under MIT license for commercial use.

  • Company still planning major R2 successor release later this year.

Why it matters: DeepSeek is proving that China can build AI models as strong as the ones from Silicon Valley. Even small updates like this help them stay in the race and push the industry forward with cheaper, high-quality AI tools.

AI BREAKTHROUGHS

TELEGRAM & xAI

Image source: The AI Daily / 4o

The AI Daily: Telegram just announced a major partnership with Elon Musk's xAI that will bring the Grok chatbot to over one billion users across the messaging platform this summer.

Key details:

  • xAI will pay Telegram $300 million in cash and equity for the one-year partnership deal.

  • Telegram will receive 50% of all subscription revenue from xAI sales made through the app.

  • Grok will be integrated across all Telegram apps and available to users for chat assistance.

  • The AI will help with writing suggestions, summarizing conversations, creating stickers, and business support.

  • Users can access Grok directly from the search bar or pin it to the top of their chats.

Why it matters: This gives xAI a fast way to reach a huge audience, while Telegram gets powerful AI tools and a big new revenue stream. It shows how tech giants are rushing to add AI to their platforms as chatbot competition grows.

FAST TRACKS

🗞️ What Matters in AI Right Now?

Similarweb announced AI Agents, a new suite of AI tools made for SEO and sales, trained on over 100 million websites and 5 billion keywords.

Odyssey unveiled AI-powered video tech that streams frames every 40ms, letting users interact in real time—no game engine needed

Salesforce AI Research introduced BLIP3-o, a new model that blends text and image understanding using both autoregressive and diffusion methods

Factory AI launched Droids, dev agents that connect with GitHub and Slack to write code, handle incidents, and manage projects for $40/month

Mistral AI introduced Codestral Embed, a code-focused embedding model that beats Voyage Code 3 and OpenAI’s best in tests

Resemble AI open-sourcing Chatterbox, a speech model that users preferred over ElevenLabs 63.75% of the time after millions of test runs

🧰 AI Tools of the Day

🔍 GPTGO: Search Google and ChatGPT side-by-side for instant answers.

🏡 REimagineHome: Redesign rooms or exteriors with AI-powered virtual staging.

✍️ Writesonic: Automate SEO content creation using real-time data and AI.

🧠 AndiSearch: Get ad-free, fact-based answers from an AI search assistant.

🤖 MeetCody: Train an AI assistant on your business docs for instant support.

AI PROMPTS

🎥 Create Engaging Video Scripts

#CONTEXT:
You are an expert creative scriptwriter specializing in engaging, conversational video content that captures attention and drives interest. Your task is to help the user develop scripts for videos promoting a product or service to a target audience on a specific video platform.

What kind of prompts would you like to see more of?

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Source: The AI Daily

YESTERDAY’S POOL

"What prompts do you want more of?"

Writing: 60% ✅

Business: 40%

Submit your opinions in our polls to be featured!

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Jason - The AI Daily