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AI Daily Brief — 10 March 2025

A Monday dominated by Asian AI ambition and Western market jitters. Foxconn debuted Taiwan’s first major reasoning LLM, ex-DeepMind founders surfaced with a $555M valuation, and Beijing’s Manus agent kept blowing past viral-launch records as the Magnificent 7 cratered on tariff and recession fears.

Top stories

  • Foxconn unveils FoxBrain, Taiwan’s first reasoning LLM. Hon Hai Research Institute announced a 70B model built on Llama 3.1, trained in four weeks on 120 NVIDIA H100 GPUs via the Taipei-1 supercomputer with a 128K context window. The team pledged an open-source release with a public showcase at NVIDIA GTC 2025 on March 20. via Hon Hai
  • Reflection AI exits stealth with $130M. Ex-DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin (Gemini reward modeling lead) and Ioannis Antonoglou (AlphaGo co-creator) raised a $105M Series A led by Lightspeed and CRV plus a $25M seed from Sequoia, valuing the NYC startup at $555M. Backers include Reid Hoffman, Alexandr Wang and NVIDIA’s venture arm. via The AI Insider
  • Magnificent 7 sell-off intensifies. Tesla cratered ~15% in one of the worst tech tape days of early 2025; NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Apple all fell, five of seven megacaps down more than 4%. Triggers: Trump tariff uncertainty, recession chatter, and lingering DeepSeek-driven doubts over hyperscaler AI capex. via Yahoo Finance
  • Manus AI waitlist crosses 2 million. Four days after Butterfly Effect’s invite-only beta launch of the Chinese general-purpose agent, the waitlist ballooned past 2M users. The team simultaneously announced a partnership with Alibaba Cloud to bring Manus to domestic models and infrastructure. via Wikipedia
  • Microsoft MAI plan to displace OpenAI inside Copilot. Following The Information’s prior-week scoop, secondary coverage detailed Microsoft’s in-house ‘MAI’ reasoning family said to match OpenAI and Anthropic on industry benchmarks. Redmond reportedly tested alternatives from xAI, Meta, Anthropic and DeepSeek for Microsoft 365 Copilot, considering an MAI API release later in 2025. via Dataconomy

Who shipped

Foxconn opened the week with FoxBrain — a 70B Llama-derived Traditional Chinese reasoning model outperforming Llama-3-Taiwan-70B on TMMLU+ math and logic benchmarks. Reflection AI emerged from stealth with a clear thesis: superintelligent autonomous coding agents. Butterfly Effect kept Manus AI in the headlines, with Alibaba Cloud now backing distribution.

Open-source pulse

FoxBrain’s pledged open-weights release at GTC 2025 keeps Asia’s open-source momentum running — following DeepSeek-R1, QwQ-32B and Mistral OCR earlier in the year. Manus’s Alibaba partnership signals Chinese open infrastructure becoming the default substrate for general-purpose agents.

Money, infra & hardware

Reflection AI’s $130M raise capped the day. Markets moved in the opposite direction — NVIDIA, Tesla and the rest of the Mag 7 sold off on tariff and recession fears, with the AI-capex thesis under renewed scrutiny.

Quiet corners

No major arxiv landmark specifically dated March 10 surfaced. The Kadrey v. Meta docket added a ruling denying plaintiffs’ motion to compel Reuters documents — a minor but ongoing data point in the authors’ copyright suit.

By the numbers

  • 70B — FoxBrain parameter count, trained in 4 weeks on 120 H100s
  • $130M — Reflection AI total raise; $555M valuation
  • ~15% — Tesla single-day drop in the Mag 7 sell-off
  • 2M+ — Manus AI waitlist, four days after launch
  • Most-mentioned company: Foxconn

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 10 March 2025.