China's DeepSeek V4 vs US Frontier Models: AI Supremacy Battle Heats Up + New Launches

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   Good morning Legion. We are officially one week away from NEARCON. The near team hopes to see you in San Francisco next week for a wide range of talks and updates on the near ecosystem and their AI strategy going forward. These days, if you blink, you can miss a bunch of news on the latest models and AI developments.

2. 0:18

   We heard last week about how NEAR is building Iron Claw, and how that will hopefully provide a secure environment for open claw agents running through near AI. To kick off this week, we have an avalanche of news as it pertains to new models coming onto the market.

3. 0:32

   The first is probably what most people are looking forward to. DeepSeek V4 drops this week, likely today, but possibly also tomorrow. There have been leaks suggesting this will be the first open source model that outperforms frontier models from Silicon Valley. All eyes on the DeepSeek team.

4. 0:48

   And if you want an inside look at how that team is, run the Financial Times deep dive on the Chinese genius plan that we featured last week is a fantastic starting point beyond Deepseek V4 for quite a few other releases to look out for this week. Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT 5.3.

5. 1:05

   Claude Sonnet 5, Grok 4.2 Will the frontier models retain their state of the art models against the Chinese competitors? This is the story right now to watch for near any outcome as a plus, as privacy for models will only continue to increase as more businesses look to use either custom models or private inference in the future.

6. 1:25

   For those of you tracking what the people inside these labs think, AGI timelines are speeding up. Sam Altman now expects AGI by 2028, two years away. A known AGI skeptic, Francois Chollet, now expects AGI by 2034 years away and the Microsoft AI CEO believes, as we repeated last week, 12 to 18 months until most, if not all white collar tasks are replaced by AI.

7. 1:51

   And last but not least, Kimi Claw was dropped over the weekend Monday in China, which, as they say, you can now discover, call and chain your agents instantly within Kimi, among many other benefits, folks were only in February.

8. 2:04

   And if you're following this channel in the near ecosystem more generally, there has never been a better time to be interested in AI and crypto, and never a better time to be in the near ecosystem. Come to NEARCON next week to hear directly from Illiaa, Bowen, and George and Sal about the future of NEAR. It's about to get very exciting.