Skip to content
Source · Daily Brief

AI Daily Brief — 19 August 2025

A heavy China-vs-US Tuesday. DeepSeek dropped V3.1 silently. NVIDIA designed B30A for China. EliseAI raised $250M. ByteDance teased Seed-OSS-36B. Backdrop: Pixel 10 reveal 24 hours away.

Top stories

  • DeepSeek releases V3.1 with 128K context and hybrid modes via WeChat. Quietly announced in WeChat user group. Unifies V3 and R1 into single hybrid model supporting both “thinking” and “non-thinking” modes within one architecture. 128K context (double previous online). 685B parameters (671B main + ~14B multi-token prediction), MoE with ~37B active per token. Open weights followed on HF Aug 21. via Bloomberg
  • NVIDIA reported developing new Blackwell-based B30A chip for China. More powerful than H20. Single-die design (vs dual-die B300), roughly half compute of flagship B300, with HBM and NVLink. NVIDIA hoped to ship samples to Chinese customers as early as September. Follows Trump administration’s reversal allowing H20 sales to resume with 15% revenue share. via TechCrunch
  • DeepSeek V3.1 emerges as flagship Chinese open model amid GPT-5 competition. Direct open-weight challenger to GPT-5. Early benchmarks (Artificial Analysis) put V3.1’s reasoning-mode Intelligence Index at 60, up incrementally. Improvements in coding, math and agentic tool use over R1-0528. via PYMNTS
  • EliseAI closes $250M Series E at $2.2B led by a16z. Vertical-AI startup (automation for housing and outpatient healthcare). a16z lead with Bessemer joining and existing backers Sapphire and Navitas. Valuation roughly doubled. Company crossed $100M ARR earlier in 2025. Plans to roughly double headcount. via EliseAI
  • ByteDance Seed-OSS-36B prepped for next-day release. Seed team prepared Apache-2.0 release. Includes Base with/without synthetic data plus Instruct. 36B-parameter model trained on only 12T tokens, 512K context window, flexible “thinking budget” control. Materials surfacing Aug 19. via VentureBeat

Who shipped

DeepSeek shipped V3.1. NVIDIA shipped B30A leak. EliseAI shipped capital. ByteDance teed up Seed-OSS-36B.

Open-source pulse

NVIDIA B30A reporting moved Chinese chip-equity narrative — Bloomberg/BNN framed as NVIDIA staying competitive in China amid US export controls, with ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent flagged as likely customers. NVIDIA officially said evaluating product options but declined to confirm specifics. via BNN Bloomberg

Money, infra & hardware

DeepSeek V3.1 trained in UE8M0 FP8 “for next-generation domestic Chinese chips” (formal release notes Aug 21). UE8M0 FP8 designed for “next generation of domestic chips to be released soon”. Read as DeepSeek aligning training stack with Huawei Ascend / Cambricon roadmaps. via The Register

Quiet corners

Pre-game for Made by Google: Pixel 10 / Tensor G5 / Gemini Nano hardware reveal teed up for Aug 20. Pixel 10 baseline $799; Pixel 10 Pro Fold $1,799. GPT-5 fallout still dominating AI conversation; “Turbo” variants and steering discussion. Anthropic “Claude can end conversations” coverage still circulating mid-week.

By the numbers

  • 685B / ~37B / 128K — V3.1 total / active / context
  • 60 vs 59 — V3.1 reasoning Intelligence Index vs R1
  • B30A vs B300 — single-die / dual-die NVIDIA China design
  • $250M / $2.2B — EliseAI Series E / valuation
  • 36B / 12T / 512K — Seed-OSS-36B params / training tokens / context

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 19 August 2025.