Interesting Links, January 28th 2025

AI

Everyone is abuzz about Deepseek after NVidia and other stocks had a torrid Monday (and then a rebound today), but if you only read one piece Ben Thomspson’s Deepseek FAQ. Two, well then take a look at the technical paper - DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning. Seperately the R1 model is making its way onto providers fast with availability on Cloudflare already.
Agent Experience is a new concept that Matt Billman, CEO of Netlify, has just introduced. I love this comment “Agents will far more frequently be collaborators and extensions of humans, rather than replacements. Both will wildly increase the productivity and the ability of a single human being.” That feels pretty on-point for at least the software world for now.
Vercel continue to build out AI SDK, their unified API for building agents with LLMs, this time with the addition of Googles Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental model. Lets be honest, being the ower of npm i ai is a pretty slick developer marketing move on Vercels part.

Semgrep, a provider of SAST and SCA tools, changed their licesensing back in December, and predictably there has been a fork - opengrep - backed by a variety of vendors who integrated semgrep rules into their own products. We will have to wait and see if this has anything like the same momentum that OpenTofu has, but I honestly don’t see anything close to the level of usage of Semgrep OSS vs where Terraform was when Hashicorp relicensed in 2023 prior to their (still pending) acquisition by IBM.