President Trump issued an executive order directing the DOJ not to enforce the TikTok divestment law for 75 days. The order attempts to prevent penalties against companies working with TikTok, despite a new bipartisan law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban. Trump also proposed an unexplained government joint venture for TikTok ownership.

Major tech leaders including Musk, Zuckerberg, and Cook are investing billions in Trump's administration through donations and relationships to influence policies on antitrust, AI, defense contracts, and regulation. Companies seek protection from legal challenges and aim to secure government contracts, while competing against each other for Trump's favor.

Venture capitalists are prioritizing investments in AI startups developing specialized enterprise solutions and infrastructure for 2025. Key focus areas include task-specific AI models, business workflow automation, enterprise resilience, and AI infrastructure development. VCs emphasize the importance of distinguishing between standalone products and mere features when evaluating investment opportunities.

During TikTok's brief US ban, Chinese apps RedNote, Likee, Clapper, and Flip dominated app store rankings. RedNote secured the top spot with 700,000 new US users, while other video apps saw significant growth. Users deliberately chose Chinese alternatives over Instagram Reels, despite TikTok's return to service.

DeepSeek has released DeepSeek-R1, an open-source AI reasoning model claiming performance comparable to OpenAI's o1 on specific benchmarks. The model features 671 billion parameters and is available through Hugging Face with commercial usage rights. While subject to Chinese regulatory oversight, R1 offers significantly lower pricing than o1 and includes smaller versions for local deployment.