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AI Daily Brief — 25 February 2025

Tuesday delivered a double Chinese open-source punch and Microsoft’s biggest consumer-AI commoditization yet. DeepSeek opened Day 2 of Open Source Week with DeepEP — a high-performance communication library for Mixture-of-Experts dispatch/combine: efficient all-to-all GPU kernels, FP8 dispatching, BF16 combining, Hopper GPU support, InfiniBand and RoCE compatibility — 4.3K GitHub stars on Day 1. Alibaba simultaneously open-sourced Wan 2.1 under Apache 2.0 (14B text-to-video, 14B image-to-video, 1.3B that runs on 8 GB consumer VRAM) — and it took #1 on the VBench leaderboard at 86.22%, ahead of Sora (84.28%), Runway Gen-3 (82.32%), and Tencent HunyuanVideo. Microsoft removed daily usage caps on Copilot Voice and Think Deeper (powered by o1) for all free users globally. DeepSeek separately announced steep off-peak API discounts effective Feb 26: V3 at 50% off, R1 at 75% off.

Top stories

  • DeepSeek open-sources DeepEP — Open Source Week Day 2. First open EP communication library for MoE: all-to-all GPU kernels, FP8 dispatching, BF16 combining, Hopper GPU support, InfiniBand and RoCE. 4.3K GitHub stars in 24 hours. via DeepSeek GitHub
  • Alibaba open-sources Wan 2.1 video generation models under Apache 2.0. T2V-1.3B, T2V-14B, I2V-14B-720P, I2V-14B-480P. First video model to natively render Chinese and English text within frames; 1.3B runs on 8 GB consumer VRAM (RTX 4070-class). Hugging Face, GitHub, ModelScope. via Alizila
  • Wan 2.1 tops VBench at 86.22% — beating Sora. Ahead of Sora (84.28%), Runway Gen-3 (82.32%), Tencent HunyuanVideo (83.24%). Only open-source model in the top 5. 2.5x faster VAE claimed. via SCMP
  • Microsoft makes Copilot Voice and Think Deeper free + unlimited. Daily usage caps removed for all free users globally. Think Deeper is powered by OpenAI o1; previously rate-limited even for free users. Copilot Pro retains preferred access during peak load and early access to experimental features. via Microsoft
  • DeepSeek announces steep off-peak API discounts up to 75%. Effective Feb 26: V3 at 50% off, R1 at 75% off during 12:30am-8:30am Beijing time. One day after DeepSeek resumed top-up credits for API access (paused since late January due to capacity constraints). via PYMNTS

Who shipped

DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Microsoft all shipped Tuesday. Anthropic‘s Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Feb 24) carried into day-2 coverage. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and xAI made no dated launches.

Open-source pulse

Two simultaneous frontier-class open releases from China — DeepEP and Wan 2.1 — sustained the open-weights surge from the prior week. Claude 3.7 Sonnet day-2 coverage emphasized the 70.3% SWE-bench Verified result against o1’s 48.9% and DeepSeek-R1’s 49.2%. via Anthropic

By the numbers

  • 4.3K — DeepEP GitHub stars in 24 hours
  • 86.22% — Wan 2.1 VBench (open-source #1)
  • 8 GB VRAM — Wan 2.1 1.3B consumer hardware floor
  • 75% / 50% — DeepSeek off-peak R1 / V3 discounts
  • Most-mentioned country: China (open-source releases)

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 25 February 2025.