AI Daily Brief — 24 January 2025
Friday closed Davos with AI as the dominant theme and silicon as the unsolved bottleneck. Jensen Huang sat down with BlackRock’s Larry Fink to call AI “the largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” with global data-centre power demand forecast to climb from roughly 55 GW to 84 GW within two years. Trump’s video address from Day 4 echoed through the panels. DeepSeek’s app climbed to rank #31 on the US Apple App Store — three days from the takeover that would erase $600 billion of NVIDIA market cap.
Top stories
- Jensen Huang at Davos calls AI “the largest infrastructure buildout in human history.” Speaking with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, the NVIDIA CEO described AI as a “five-layer cake” — energy, chips, cloud, models, applications — requiring trillions of dollars in spending. Global data-centre power demand forecast to grow from ~55 GW to 84 GW within two years; Trump’s $500B Stargate pledge framed as a national-scale answer. via NVIDIA
- Trump’s Davos video address reverberates through the final-day panels. The previous day’s virtual address — in which Trump declared the US “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and vowed to use emergency powers to fast-track power plants co-located with AI data centers — dominated Friday’s policy panels. via WEF
- ISO unveils first International AI Standards Summit. The International Organization for Standardization used the WEF closing day to launch the 2025 International AI Standards Summit — billed as the world’s first global forum to set interoperable AI-development standards. via ISO
- DeepSeek climbs to #31 on US App Store; #133 on Google Play. The chatbot app continued its viral climb. MIT Technology Review published a deep-dive analyzing how DeepSeek produced a top-tier reasoning model despite US GPU export sanctions — framing it as proof Chinese labs can innovate around hardware curbs. via MIT Tech Review
Who shipped
No new lab releases. OpenAI‘s Operator (Jan 23) still owned analyst notes; Anthropic reportedly continued $60B round groundwork. Google DeepMind stayed quiet — Gemini 2.0 Flash GA was twelve days away.
Open-source pulse
The DeepSeek-R1 distillation wave kept building. Independent benchmark replications confirmed the R1-Distill-Qwen-7B beat QwQ-32B-Preview on AIME 2024; the laptop-runnable smaller variants drove the most viral X traction.
Money, infra & hardware
NVDA traded near pre-crash levels — the historic single-day drop sat three trading days ahead. Davos AI panels repeatedly flagged the binding constraints: energy permits, datacenter siting, advanced-packaging capacity. Google’s January $1B Anthropic tranche and Databricks’ $10B Meta-backed Series J at $62.5B framed the funding backdrop; AI deals were running roughly 22% of global venture dollars.
Quiet corners
arXiv produced no landmark frontier paper on Friday; the week’s center of gravity stayed on the R1 (2501.12948) and Kimi k1.5 (2501.12599) reports posted two days earlier.
By the numbers
- 55 → 84 GW — global data-centre power demand forecast (two-year horizon)
- #31 — DeepSeek US App Store rank (up from launch-week obscurity)
- ~22% — AI share of January global venture funding
- Most-mentioned person: Jensen Huang
Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 24 January 2025.