AI Daily: AI chip export restrictions could benefit Huawei

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

TRAINING COSTS: Over the past year, Meta Platforms (META) has approached Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) to partner in paying the costs to train its large language model, Llama, The Information’s Kalley Huang and Erin Woo report, citing people briefed with discussions. In exchange, Meta has offered incentives such as direct influence on Llama’s feature development, the report states, adding however that some of the companies approached had balked at the idea that they would be paying for something that will eventually be free through open source.

CHIP EXPORT RESTRICTIONS: The Trump administration’s restrictions on AI chip exports by Nvidia (NVDA), AMD (AMD), and Intel (INTC) to China could help turn Huawei into a global chip-making powerhouse, The New York Times’ Tripp Mickle reports. If Huawei gains ground, many at Nvidia have painted a dark picture of a future where China will use the company’s chips to build A.I. data centers across the world for the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic effort to increase Beijing’s influence by paying for infrastructure projects around the world, a person familiar with the company’s thinking said.

LOWER SCORES: A discrepancy between first- and third-party benchmark results for Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o3 AI model is raising questions about the company’s transparency and model testing practices, TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers reports. When OpenAI unveiled o3 in December, the company claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the competition away — the next-best model managed to answer only around 2% of FrontierMath problems correctly. As it turns out, that figure was likely an upper bound, achieved by a version of o3 with more computing behind it than the model OpenAI publicly launched last week, the author says. Epoch AI, the research institute behind FrontierMath, released results of its independent benchmark tests of o3 on Friday. Epoch found that o3 scored around 10%, well below OpenAI’s highest claimed score.

RAPIDLY GROWING: BTIG initiated coverage of Tempus AI (TEM) with a Buy rating and $60 price target. Tempus AI is a rapidly growing precision medicine platform technology company, which has “done a good job in its early days” to monetize its genomics and data business to medical oncologists and with pharma companies. While Tempus is now focused in cancer, the company looks to achieve similar scale across diseases, including in cardiology and beyond, and possesses one of the largest molecular libraries of cancer patients in the world, adds the firm, which believes the company’s AI applications and data business represent “a significant free call option for investors.”