Elon Musk’s X begins its push into financial services with Visa deal

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1. Elon Musk’s X begins its push into financial services with Visa deal

X has announced the launch of a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments services provided by Visa. The X Money Account will enable users to move funds between traditional bank accounts and their digital wallet, allowing them to make instant peer-to-peer payments.

This is the first concrete move from X to create a financial ecosystem for the social media site, which was previously called Twitter before Musk purchased it in 2022. The service is expected to launch in the first quarter and deals with more financial partners are likely. One of the first use cases for X Money is to allow creators on the site to accept payments and store funds without external institutions.

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2. Alibaba’s Qwen team releases AI models that can control PCs and phones

Alibaba's Qwen team has released a new family of AI models, Qwen2.5-VL, capable of text and image analysis tasks. The models can parse files, understand videos, count objects in images, and control a PC, similar to OpenAI's Operator model. The best Qwen2.5-VL model beats OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash on video understanding, math, document analysis, and question-answering evaluations.

Qwen2.5-VL can analyze charts, graphics, extract data from scans of invoices and forms, and comprehend multiple-hours-long videos. However, due to being developed by a Chinese company, Qwen2.5-VL has certain restrictions on topics it can discuss, such as Xi Jinping's mistakes. It can interact with software on PCs and mobile devices.

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3. Deep Research is starting to roll out on Android

4. ChatGPT Gov

OpenAI has announced ChatGPT Gov, a tailored version of its ChatGPT model, to provide U.S. government agencies with access to its frontier models. The new version allows agencies to deploy ChatGPT Gov in their own Microsoft Azure commercial or Azure Government cloud, enabling them to manage their own security, privacy, and compliance requirements. It also expedites internal authorization of OpenAI's tools for handling non-public sensitive data.

ChatGPT Gov includes features like saving and sharing conversations, uploading text and image files, and custom GPTs. OpenAI is working towards FedRAMP Moderate and High accreditations for its fully managed SaaS product, ChatGPT Enterprise, and is evaluating expanding ChatGPT Gov to Azure's classified regions.

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5. Nvidia rises more than 8%, bouncing back from Monday’s AI stock rout

Nvidia shares rose by 8.8% on Tuesday after a cheaper, open-source AI model from China caused the biggest market value loss in stock market history. The stock plunged 17% on Monday, slashed more than $595 billion from the company's valuation, the biggest single-day market cap decline on record. Despite the stock's bounce, it is still down about 8% on the week.

DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, released an open-source model that reportedly outperformed OpenAI's in different tests and cost less than $6 million to build. Nvidia called DeepSeek's R1 model "an excellent AI advancement" and most Wall Street analysts stood by Nvidia after the sell-off. Some see DeepSeek developments as a long-term positive for AI, as more powerful LLM models that can run at a fraction of the original cost estimates will mean that genAI adoption should come easier and faster across the software universe.

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