A U.S. Department of Energy helicopter operating under the callsign “ENERGY14,” used for aerial radiological detection, was spotted in the San Francisco metro area ahead of the Super Bowl this weekend.

The nuclear-sniffing helicopter, which flies with specialized sensor pods that detect gamma and neutron radiation and map radioactive plumes in real time, was observed surveying over parts of the San Francisco metro area on Monday.

Open-source intelligence accounts documented ENERGY14’s flight path using Flightradar24 data. X user TheIntelFrog noted that the helicopter was “conducting low-level sweeps over the San Francisco area to obtain baseline samples before Super Bowl LX.”

National Nuclear Security Administration N2314 as ENRGY14 conducting low level sweeps over the San Francisco area to obtain baseline samples before Super Bowl LX. pic.twitter.com/Czr1dDPhIy

— TheIntelFrog (@TheIntelFrog) February 2, 2026

Another X user documented ENERGY14’s radiological aerial survey of the metro area.

San Francisco getting it’s first Nuke scan before the Super Bowl pic.twitter.com/4CQ9IoZHTR

— Joe (@0xosprey) February 2, 2026

SF Jet Spotter snapped photos of the helicopter.

“ENERGY14” Nuke-Sniffing Helicopter
Surveilling San Francisco ahead of this weekends Super Bowl pic.twitter.com/sEgBA9k2Ml

— SF Jet Spotter (@SFJET147) February 2, 2026

Beyond the nuke-sniffing mission, we wonder what type of layered counter-UAS threat detection is in place around Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, given the event’s high profile.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In the last week, protesters in Minneapolis began putting up barricades to create checkpoints that bar federal immigration officers from entering certain neighborhoods.

It is all too familiar to those of us who remember what the mayor in 2020 called “the Summer of Love” in Seattle and the establishment of an autonomous area known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP).

Ironically, these barricades are being set up after a jury ruled against the City of Seattle for negligence after the killing of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. in CHOP.

The self-declared anarchist enclave was originally called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) but was later renamed the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP).

In 2020, we discussed the prospect of tortious liability for the city, which abandoned the Seattle Police Department (SPD) East Precinct to the mob and stood by as CHOP declared itself the sole authority in its seized area.

As I noted in the column, “If Seattle gets chopped in court, it will be due not to a failure of government but to a failure to govern.”

Seattle-based ice cream company, Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, and other businesses sued the city.

While first supporting the autonomous zone as part of a “summer of love,” Democratic politicians like then-Mayor Jenny Durkan later distanced themselves from the massive damage and crime in the zone.

The Mays lawsuit included not only the city but former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best and Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.

The jury awarded the Mays family more than $30 million in damages — $4 million to the estate of Mays Jr. and $26 million to Mays Sr., according to The Seattle Times.

Mays Jr. was visiting Seattle from San Diego when he went to the area to join the protests.

He was later shot and the police failed to respond for five hours due to the limits on entry into CHOP.

At that point, the crime scene was hopelessly corrupted.

Here is the complaint: Complaint Antonio Mays, Jr.

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker),

Perhaps the most discouraging condition of the modern age is the absolute breakdown in communication among members of society.  It once seemed reasonable to expect that the Internet and social media might aid in our understanding of each other.  Instead, online forums are filled with people who speak the same language but interpret words entirely differently.

With the arrest of former CNN commentator Don Lemon for allegedly violating the religious rights of worshipers in Minneapolis, Democrats and the corporate news media have universally condemned Attorney General Pam Bondi for somehow “infringing” upon Lemon’s First Amendment rights as a so-called “journalist.”  They intentionally ignore how Lemon joined others in storming a church, intimidating congregants, and causing emotional harm to those worshipers (including children) who understandably felt as if they were under attack.  Lemon and his apologists continue to defend the organized raid of a Christian service as some kind of “protest” and describe the unwanted intruders as “protesters.”  For those who were made to suffer through the invasion, however, their ordeal felt like an act of terrorism perpetrated by terrorists whose intent was to scare those assembled to worship.

When society can’t agree upon the difference between “protest” and “terrorism,” we have a serious problem.  We have seen this dilemma play out all over the Minneapolis area recently.  Democrat officials describe federal agents conducting lawful arrests as “terrorists” and “Nazis” and defend criminal illegal aliens as “victims.”  Trained mobs of leftist agitators who intentionally obstruct the professional duties of law enforcement officers insist on calling themselves “legal observers” and “peaceful protesters.”  When Democrat officials and members of the corporate news media describe people who commit crimes as “legal” and “peaceful,” it is impossible for society to share any common respect for the law.

As a society, we have been debating government attacks on free speech and government-engineered censorship with increased frequency at least since the presidency of Barack Obama.  

Obama was the first modern American president to really go on offense against what he called “fake news,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.”  He started the pressure campaign on Silicon Valley’s tech titans to “police” their social media sites for “false” information.  While many of us vocally objected to this incipient collective of government and industry “experts” deciding for the rest of us what is “true,” Obama and his supporters insisted that “incorrect” information constituted an unacceptable national security threat.

But how can a society that disagrees about the distinctions between “protest” and “terrorism” or “criminal obstruction” and “legal observation” possibly decipher what is “correct” and “incorrect” information?  When people with power accord themselves the additional power to declare what is “true,” a viewpoint monopoly inevitably rises to crush dissent.  For free speech to function in any authentic form, the public sphere must remain a space where all information — whether true or false — is vigorously debated.

Otherwise, all we have is State-sanctioned dogma — or what the quietly dissenting members of communist societies once derisively referred to as “political correctness.”  In a distressing sign of collapsing respect for free speech across the West, too many nations today actually police citizens’ speech in order to ensure that their thoughts and words comply with narratives constructed and deemed “correct” by the government.  They do this despite having emerged victorious from a twentieth-century Cold War that routinely distinguished Western respect for freedom of speech from the suffocating Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union’s speech police.

The divisions within society have become so great that Democrats and Republicans in the United States can’t even agree about what should be protected as inviolable free speech.  Conservatives and other non-leftists have felt the sting of censorship since Obama’s presidency.  Without explicit warnings or explanations, Big Tech companies began removing online advertisers and other sources of revenue from conservative websites.  Social media companies covertly limited the visibility (and therefore influence) of conservative writers.  Search engines relegated popular conservative publications to obscurity by burying their keyword matches many pages back in relevant hits.  Without any official announcements from government or corporate authorities, it became clear that conservative voices were being targeted for elimination.

Since Obama’s presidency, that cancerous viewpoint discrimination metastasized in many directions: Banks closed the accounts of conservative publications and institutions.  Web hosts refused to support conservative websites.  After the 2020 election, the titans of Big Tech conspired to censor any Americans who argued that various forms of electoral fraud had handed Joe Biden the presidency.  The Biden administration piggybacked on Silicon Valley’s embrace of censorship by working with social media companies to censor anyone who disagreed with the government’s COVID policies.  That censorship became so pronounced that even medical research was targeted for deletion under the pretense that concerns for “public health” and “national security” justified the censorship of scientific debate.  As censorship of the 2020 election and COVID became more widespread, those who were doing the censoring kept pushing the envelope.  For a while, it really looked as if Democrat-embraced narratives concerning everything from man-made “global warming” to “transgenderism” would be declared sacrosanct and too “politically correct” for Americans to debate.  Feeling emboldened to declare “public truths,” the Biden administration turbocharged Obama’s initial directive for social media censorship by building the architecture for a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose purpose was unapologetically directed toward limiting conservative points of view.

For Republicans, conservatives, and other non-leftists, Democrats’ collusion with Silicon Valley to censor information deemed “untrue” constituted an unparalleled attack on Americans’ free speech.  As with so many other conflicts in society today, ordinary Democrats didn’t recognize this threat at all.  When they did acknowledge that conservative voices were being silenced, many immediately justified those infringements on Americans’ natural rights by repeating Obama’s original propaganda that “fake news,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and even simply information that fellow leftists judged as “harmful” to society deserved no First Amendment protections.

Perhaps more troubling, even as Democrats argue for mass censorship, they portray themselves as victims of censorship.  When parents insist on protecting their children from “transgender” indoctrination, sexually explicit guides encouraging minors to engage in adult activities, and outright pornography, Democrats pretend that parental supervision violates free speech.  When the FCC reprimands Jimmy Kimmel for lying to the American public by falsely blaming Charlie Kirk’s assassination on President Trump’s MAGA movement (instead of a leftist in a gay relationship with a “trans” furry and someone who allegedly disparaged Charlie’s Christian faith as a form of “hate”), Democrats pretend that Kimmel (who enjoys more free speech than almost anyone in America) is being censored.  When Don Lemon joins a gang of leftist agitators to trespass inside a church, disrupt worship services, and terrorize those assembled to commune with God, the corporate news media pretend that the person doing the terrorizing is somehow a “victim” of government attacks on the First Amendment.

Right now in America censorship of non-leftists is justified, while any pushback against leftist orthodoxy is falsely portrayed as censorship.  If this corrosive double standard weren’t already obvious, “comedians” such as Stephen Colbert make it more glaringly so each day.  Just last week Colbert “joked” that federal agents who enforce America’s immigration laws are worse than Nazi Germany’s SS troops.  Unlike members of that Nazi paramilitary organization, who would have surely imprisoned or murdered Colbert before he even had a chance to speak, ICE and Border Patrol agents put their lives on the line every day to arrest pedophiles, rapists, and murderers illegally residing in the United States.  Colbert calls those law enforcement officers “Nazis,” and he will continue to enjoy the privilege of expressing his vile viewpoints on television.

However, when ordinary conservatives are censored online, Colbert says nothing.  The powerful play “victim,” while the powerless are targeted and silenced.  

We may speak the same language, but our words don’t mean the same things.

Floridians were once again warned this week to watch out for falling iguanas as an ultra-rare cold blast sent temperatures plunging to record lows of 22F in Jacksonville and 24F in Orlando. Whenever Arctic air pours into The Sunshine State, its citrus industry inevitably takes a hit, and this deep freeze comes on top of years of damage from greening disease and repeated blows from tropical cyclones that have already decimated the crop.

It’s so cold in Florida that iguanas started falling from trees. 🦎🥶

When temperatures fall into the 40s or below, iguanas can become cold-stunned, temporarily losing muscle control. They recover as conditions warm. pic.twitter.com/FjDrT7mLmz

— AccuWeather (@accuweather) February 1, 2026

“There was significant damage to the remaining oranges to be picked in central Florida,” said Jim Roemer, a meteorologist who publishes the WeatherWealth newsletter, quoted by Bloomberg.

Roemer added, “Many key areas were well below 28 degrees for over four hours between Sunday and this morning.”

Here’s a sight you don’t see every day. Frozen orange trees in Central Florida. The irrigation was still on Sunday afternoon. pic.twitter.com/MoaWtErYfV

— Michele Blood (@BloodBrief) February 1, 2026

According to Bloomberg data, the average temperature in the Orlando metro area on Sunday was in the low 30s. The good news is that temperatures are expected to rise later in the week and, by mid-month, revert to 30-year seasonal norms around the mid-60s.

Even before the deep freeze, we have reported for years that the citrus industry in central Florida has been decimated by greening disease and tropical cyclones. The latest data from the USDA shows that this season’s orange juice harvest will be the smallest since 1930.

Judy Ganes, president of J. Ganes Consulting, told the outlet that growers were already prepared with water sprayers to help insulate oranges, and that some unharvested fruit was mature enough to be salvaged.

She added that the cold weather is expected to help with that effort, noting: “They need to get the oranges off the trees and processed before the fruit goes soft and rots, so a freeze followed by a rapid warm-up is more challenging than a lingering cold.”

Traders do not appear to view the deep freeze across major citrus-growing areas in Florida as a major issue, as orange juice futures in New York were down about 10% early Monday, trading at three-year lows after topping in early 2024 amid a citrus squeeze in US markets.

The surge in US orange juice imports from Brazil has allowed the Trump administration to mitigate potential price hikes, with prices sliding lower for much of 2025.

Update (1410ET): As was somewhat expected, the partial US government shutdown is on track to end later today after the House passed a funding deal President Trump negotiated with Senate Democrats, overcoming opposition from both ends of the political spectrum.

A group of conservatives had threatened to use procedural maneuvers to blockade the deal but relented after Trump demanded they vote to pass the measure.

“The president nailed it down,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, told reporters.

“I’m glad we are all nails and there’s one hammer.”

The House vote was 217 to 214.

The spending package, which Trump has said he wants enacted quickly, now goes to the president for his signature.

*  *  *

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday will take up a bill to fund several sectors of the federal government as a partial shutdown enters its fourth day.

Many Democrats – including leaders – have vowed to withhold support from the package.

On Monday evening, the House Committee on Rules advanced the measure – which would fully fund five sectors of the government while extending funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until Jan. 13 – in a party-line 8–4 vote following a more than four-hour committee hearing.

As Jopseph Lord and Nathan Worcester report for The Epoch Times, with Democratic leaders indicating that they won’t give their backing to the measure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will need to rely mostly on his narrow Republican majority to pass the measure.

In a full vote of the House, Johnson can spare only one defection in a party-line vote, though some Democrats are expected to back the measure.

However, some issues with the Senate proposal could lead Republicans to oppose the measure.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a longtime budget hawk and a particular opponent of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which falls under DHS, voted against the previous funding measure due to its funding for CISA, and could oppose the stopgap measure as well.

Other Republicans have pushed leadership to attach the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to the measure.

Leadership has resisted these demands, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says would make the bill dead on arrival in the upper chamber. The bill reported out of the Rules Committee didn’t include the SAVE Act.

Nevertheless, the passage of the legislation through the Rules Committee—which includes conservative skeptics of the bill such as Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas)—is a good sign for Republican leaders on the funding package’s prospects.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) downplayed the difficulties in comments to reporters on Monday.

“They all come down to the wire, and then we get our business done,” Scalise said.

The bill at issue would provide full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.

Democrats are demanding reforms to DHS and its subsidiary immigration enforcement agencies before they’ll support a full-year funding measure, though many House Democrats—including leadership—have expressed opposition to extending DHS funding at all before these reforms are addressed.

Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), meanwhile, voiced opposition to the measure at the hearing.

“I will not vote for business as usual while masked agents break into people’s homes without a judicial warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” he said, referencing ongoing disputes related to the executive branch’s use of self-issued administrative warrants, rather than court-issued judicial warrants, to enter homes.

However, one Democrat—House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)—indicated at the hearing that she would break with her party to back the measure.

“I will support this package,” DeLauro said at the hearing, referencing the five full-year funding bills attached to the package that have Democratic support.

She said that without the funding extension for DHS, Democrats “won’t be able to bring the kinds of pressure” needed to add reforms to the full-year DHS funding package.

McGovern explained his opposition in response to a question from The Epoch Times outside the hearing room.

“Personally, [I] cannot bring myself to go for one more cent for ICE without some serious guardrails put in place, and I think the leverage we have is now more so than two weeks from now,” McGovern said.

Johnson has said he is “confident” that the partial shutdown will end with the Tuesday vote, despite indicating that House Democrats haven’t given their support to pass the Senate-passed measure.

“We have a logistical challenge of getting everyone in town, and because of the conversation I had with Hakeem Jeffries, I know that we’ve got to pass a rule and probably do this mostly on our own,” Johnson told NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

House Democratic leadership has not indicated support for the measure publicly, despite it having been backed by Schumer and other Senate Democrats.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told ABC’s “This Week” that it’s clear that the “Department of Homeland Security needs to be dramatically reformed.”

“Masks should come off,” he said. “Judicial warrants should absolutely be required consistent with the Constitution, in our view, before DHS agents or ICE agents are breaking into the homes of the American people or ripping people out of their cars.”

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard on Feb. 2 defended her presence at a Fulton County elections office while FBI agents executed a search warrant there, saying President Donald Trump had requested that she go to the Georgia office and that she has the authority to take action related to election integrity and security.

“Interference in U.S. elections is a threat to our republic and a national security threat,” Gabbard said in a letter to members of Congress.

“The president and his administration are committed to safeguarding the integrity of U.S. elections to ensure that neither foreign nor domestic powers undermine the American people’s right to determine who our elected leaders are.”

She said that Trump tasked her office with taking appropriate action under the authority granted by Congress toward ensuring the integrity of elections, and specifically directed her to observe the execution of the warrant in Fulton County near Atlanta on Jan. 28.

She also said she facilitated a call in which Trump briefly thanked the agents for their work. Trump did not ask any questions during the call, and neither the president nor Gabbard issued directives, she said.

FBI officials previously described agents as executing a court-authorized warrant about a month after the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against the county seeking voting records from the 2020 presidential election. County officials have said the records were under seal and could not be produced absent a court order.

Trump has alleged that he lost in Georgia in 2020 because of election fraud.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), top Democrats on congressional intelligence committees, in a Jan. 29 letter said Gabbard’s presence was “deeply concerning.”

“The intelligence community should be focused on foreign threats and, as you yourself have testified, when those intelligence authorities are turned inwards the results can be devastating for Americans privacy and civil liberties,” they wrote.

The lawmakers asked for Gabbard’s reasoning for attending the FBI operation and legal authorities for her involvement and that of other intelligence officials.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) was among other critics of Gabbard’s actions.

“The seizure of ballots in Fulton County may trace back to Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 loss, but the danger is forward-looking. Tulsi Gabbard has no legal role in domestic law enforcement, and the FBI should not be seizing ballots,” he said on social media on Feb. 1.

Gabbard said in response that personnel from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center traveled with her to Fulton County but were not present during the execution of the warrant. She said that she has not seen the warrant, which is under seal, or evidence submitted to the court by the Department of Justice.

She also said that to preserve the integrity of American elections, officials must determine whether there has been malign interference and whether election systems are vulnerable to future exploitation.

“Election security is a national security issue,” Gabbard wrote.

The National Security Act gives the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the authority to coordinate and integrate national intelligence, including intelligence related to elections, Gabbard said.

She promised that the office would not “irresponsibly share incomplete intelligence assessments” concerning election interference.

Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said on X this week that Gabbard had found 2020 election fraud. Kent, who did not elaborate, later shared Gabbard’s letter to Warner and Himes.

The Kremlin on Tuesday pushed back on Trump’s claims that India is preparing to cut off Russian oil purchases following his major Truth Social announcement of a new US-India trade deal that sharply reduces tariffs on Indian exports.

“So far, we haven’t heard any statements from New Delhi on this matter,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, signaling that Moscow has received no official confirmation from India in light of Trump’s assertions.

Peskov said Moscow is still “carefully monitoring the news” around Trump’s claims, on the heels of his “wonderful” phone call with India’s Modi and the tariff relief.

Trump had announced the US will trim its punitive tariff on Indian imports to 18% after striking what he hailed as a new “trade deal” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Crucially it hinges on New Delhi having reportedly ended its purchases of Russian crude and swapping them for massive US energy and goods buys.

“Out of friendship and respect for Prime Minister Modi and, as per his request, effective immediately, we agreed to a Trade Deal between the United States and India, whereby the United States will charge a reduced Reciprocal Tariff, lowering it from 25% to 18%,” Trump posted. “Our amazing relationship with India will be even stronger going forward.”

And yet, 24 hours later and India’s Foreign Ministry has also remained silent on the question of abandoning Russian oil.

Given all of this, and that the potential remains that Trump’s statements were too out front and presumptuous in terms of anything India may have actually agreed to in a finalized way, Peskov additionally said that while Russia “respects” US-Indian relations, Moscow’s priority remains its own “strategic partnership” with New Delhi.

“And we intend to continue to comprehensively develop our bilateral relations with New Delhi, which is exactly what we’re doing,” he emphasized.

As recently as December, President Vladimir Putin said Russia was prepared to continue “uninterrupted shipments” of oil to India despite pressure from Washington.

Modi’s learning from Trump’s social media about how India will not buy Russian oil & details of US India trade deal (before any Indian announcement) is certainly a first…

Modiji has undoubtedly given many firsts to India. Learning from Trump’s X account about how India will not buy Russian oil & details of US India trade deal (before any Indian announcement) is certainly a first. Jai Modiji pic.twitter.com/Yt44xgcVeA

— Mahua Moitra (@MahuaMoitra) February 2, 2026

Perhaps Trump’s statement was intentionally premature in order to build more leverage and pile the pressure on Modi? The ‘devil is in the details’ in terms of what was actually agreed to in the phone call. The coming days will likely tell.

* * *

Below is more commentary via Rabobank…

Trump also struck a trade deal with India, reducing reciprocal tariffs to 18% and dropping the additional 25% after claiming India would stop buying Russian oil in favor of Venezuelan, showing how geopolitics links up. This isn’t the FTA the EU just signed, but let’s see which proves more important over time: as a well-placed Indian source noted to me, there‘s no growth in Europe vs. the US.

The fact the US will insist on the same no-transshipment rules for Chinese goods that it has with other trade partners is a blow to Beijing; equally, it blows up European hopes of building a trade coalition without the US (and in India frictions will continue, i.e., the EU agreed on green tech collaboration with Delhi, but the US said it is going to sell it more coal). The defense component will also be key. Europe now has a strategic partnership with India in that regard, but national governments hold sway there: will they want to see their defense industries moved to South Asia(?) By contrast, the US is able to move faster, though we shall see what they are prepared to share with India. Delhi at least gets to play both sides off against the other.

Trouble in paradise between Nvidia and OpenAI has intensified, as a new report from Reuters reveals that the ChatGPT maker has been ‘unsatisfied’ with Nvidia’s chips, and has been seeking alternatives since last year. 

The news comes on the heels of word that Nvidia’s plans to invest $100 billion into OpenAI were stalled – days after The Information reported that the chipmaker had been in talks to invest $60B more in OpenAI along with Microsoft and Amazon. 

NVidia had announced an agreement with OpenAI in September to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI, along with an investment of up to $100 billion – however CEO Jensen Huang told industry associates late last year that the $100 billion was not binding and not finalized. He also slammed OpenAI’s lack of discipline regarding their business strategy, while expressing concerns over competitors such as Google and Anthropic, the WSJ reported. 

Huang denied the report over the weekend – calling it “nonsense,” but reiterated that the investment wouldn’t exceed $100 billion. 

“We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI. I believe in OpenAI, the work that they do is incredible, they are one of the most consequential companies of our time, and I really love working with Sam,” he said, referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“Sam is closing the round (of investment), and we will absolutely be involved,” Huang added in comments to Bloomberg. “We will invest ‍a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made.”

The $100B deal was expected to close within weeks, however negotiations have been dragging on for months as OpenAI has struck deals with AMD and others for GPUs. 

What could possibly be the source of the confusion…?pic.twitter.com/xzXFpEeyAc

— Compound248 💰 (@compound248) February 2, 2026

Yet, now it’s OpenAI who’s too cool for Nvidia – apparently. 

The ChatGPT-maker’s shift in strategy, the details of which are first reported here, is over an increasing ​emphasis on chips used to perform specific elements of AI inference, the process when an AI model such as the one that powers the ChatGPT app responds to customer queries and requests. Nvidia remains dominant in ‌chips for training large AI models, while inference has become a new front in the competition.

This decision by OpenAI and others to seek out alternatives in the inference chip market marks a significant test of Nvidia’s AI dominance and comes as the two companies are in investment talks. -Reuters

According to a person familiar with the matter, OpenAI’s ‘shifting roadmap’ changed the its computational resource needs and ‘bogged down talks with Nvidia,’ Reuters continues. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been in discussions with various startups, including Cerebras and Grpq to provide chips for faster inference – according to two sources. Yet Nvidia struck a $20 billion licensing deal with Groq that ended OpenAI’s talks. In a statement, Nvidia said that Groq’s IP was highly complimentary to Nvidia’s product roadmap. 

Alternatives to Nvidia

OpenAI has been using Nvidia GPUs because their core design is well suited to crunching massive datasets required to train large AI models like ChatGPT. For a long time, Nvidia was the only game in town, however AI advancements have been increasingly focused on using trained models for inference and reasoning, which ‘could be a new, bigger stage of AI,’ per Reuters. 

The ChatGPT-maker’s search for GPU alternatives since last year focused on companies building chips with large amounts of memory embedded in the same piece of silicon as the rest of the chip, called SRAM. Squishing as much costly SRAM as possible onto each chip can offer speed advantages for chatbots and other AI systems as they crunch requests from millions of users.

Inference requires more memory than training because the chip needs to spend relatively more time fetching data from memory than performing mathematical operations. Nvidia and AMD GPU technology ⁠relies on external memory, which adds processing time and slows how quickly users can interact with a chatbot.

Inside OpenAI, the issue became particularly ​visible in Codex, its product for creating computer code, which the company has been aggressively marketing, one of the sources added. OpenAI staff attributed some ​of Codex’s weakness to Nvidia’s GPU-based hardware, one source said.

According to the report, Altman held a Jan. 30 call with reporters where he said that OpenAI’s coding models will “put a big premium on speed for coding work.” 

To that end, OpenAI on Monday announced a new Mac app dedicated to working with its Codex AI coding agent, which is intended to be a ‘command center’ for directing other coding agents, as well as managing coding agents across multiple projects and tasks that run for extended periods of time. 

h/t Capital.news

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Markets have shrugged off heavy metal(s) even though their plunge Friday was staggering. We are up around 5% in gold this morning following reports of queues of Singaporeans buying the dip yesterday. Yet note that this happened to an asset seen as a “safe-haven”, and as the foundation of a new global system – even as nobody anywhere is close to demanding gold as payment for exports, or is able to do so if needed. Indeed, there are whispers that a key driver of, and much of the worst damage from, the pump-‘n’-dump was centered in China (whose neo-mercantilism is ironically a key reason for fractures in fiat currency and the liberal world order). One wonders how long generic ‘markets’ can stay calm in a world in which so many people are so unenamoured of fiat FX; and how metals can cope with “because markets!” HFT speculation that make them trade like an NFT or meme stock.

Then again, markets seem to have put the extraordinary recent volatility in JGBs behind them  when nothing has been resolved there. PM Takaichi seems set for a landslide victory on 8 February that will lead us back to where we were – save the US suggesting there’s no bailout from it coming for Japan. That leaves the world’s third largest economy, the $7.8 trillion JGB market, and JPY all on edge as Tokyo deals with rising geopolitical tensions with China over Taiwan.

Going back to Friday, a meme is that metals were heavy as Fed Chair nominee Warsh was seen as a hawk: yet there’s as much likelihood of that being true as that he was picked for his looks. US rates are going to fall, but Warsh just looks hawkish. Moreover, a hawk/dove framing is arguably now irrelevant. What I dub ‘reverse perestroika’ implies a shift to a Treasury- not Fed-centric system and to industry from financialisation: logically that implies different interest rates by sector, so hawkish and dovish. As @mnicoletos puts it, it means changes to encourage banks to lend more into productive sectors. And as @ctindale points out, it requires abandoning abstract economist models of aggregate supply and demand — useless vs shocks like rare earths — to address specific material constraints in each sector, e.g., funding stockpiles to release rather than raising rates. If Warsh wants a ‘regime change’ at the Fed (as do Bessent and Trump), then that’s the form it will take, comrades, not just ‘hawk/dove’.

That’s too late for those who ended up having to raise rates after cutting them, i.e., the RBA. Australia’s property-addled economy and Reserve Bank are the first to U-turn on “because (property) markets” rate cuts, hiking to 3.85%, because of “materially” higher inflation, rather than the low inflation their abstract model had told them was looming. It looks like another hike is also going to have to follow. As the Aussie financial press put it, “Chalmers and Bullock both messed up on inflation – the RBA is finally trying to fix its inflation mistakes. When will the federal government follow suit?” Equally, when will abstract models follow suit? And when will markets grasp that is what logically follows on from all of this?

Oil slumped 4.5% Monday on the view Iranian threats of regional war are overblown. The US and Iran will talk Friday, yet the US wants a deal to end its nuclear program, which it bombed last year, and its ballistic missile program and support for terrorist proxies; Iran may float handing over enriched uranium, but says it will only act within its “national interests.” Don’t just read the financial press: follow the logistical build-up of US military power; consider reports Trump favors regime change following as many as 30,000 Iranian protestor deaths; and see there is no geostrategic logic in the US moving weapons into place then allowing Iran to carry on (including selling oil to China).

That’s also as the START US-Russia arms control agreement STOPS on Thursday, kick-starting a new nuclear arms race. Europe might have to join this time. In which case, the politics are very complex –as Draghi called for an EU “federation” to avoid being “picked off one by one” by the US and China— and as a nuclear trifecta could cost from hundreds of billions to a trillion euros. Add it to the Strategic Autonomy bill, as Europe finds that: it’s struggling to coordinate defence efforts; even replacing the US-backed internal communication system for defence data will take until at least 2030; and as it was warned that its efforts to diversify critical minerals supplies have “incomplete foundations” due to their “nonbinding” targets.

By contrast, President Trump will launch Project Vault –$12bn in seed capital, $1.7bn private, the rest from a 15-year US Export-Import Bank loan– to build a US strategic critical minerals stockpile. This is separate from the Pentagon’s and is for the civilian economy. The intention is to insulate it from wild price swings in key inputs –something China has long done for key goods, but which the West has eschewed because of its brilliant intellectual conceit of “because markets” as the answer to everything — as well as economic coercion – which China has again been able to threaten in rare earths “because markets.”

Trump also struck a trade deal with India, reducing reciprocal tariffs to 18% and dropping the additional 25% after claiming India would stop buying Russian oil in favor of Venezuelan, showing how geopolitics links up. This isn’t the FTA the EU just signed, but let’s see which proves more important over time: as a well-placed Indian source noted to me, there‘s no growth in Europe vs. the US. The fact the US will insist on the same no-transshipment rules for Chinese goods that it has with other trade partners is a blow to Beijing; equally, it blows up European hopes of building a trade coalition without the US (and in India frictions will continue, i.e., the EU agreed on green tech collaboration with Delhi, but the US said it is going to sell it more coal). The defense component will also be key. Europe now has a strategic partnership with India in that regard, but national governments hold sway there: will they want to see their defense industries moved to South Asia(?) By contrast, the US is able to move faster, though we shall see what they are prepared to share with India. Delhi at least gets to play both sides off against the other.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday will take up a bill to fund several sectors of the federal government as a partial shutdown enters its fourth day.

Many Democrats – including leaders – have vowed to withhold support from the package.

On Monday evening, the House Committee on Rules advanced the measure – which would fully fund five sectors of the government while extending funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until Jan. 13 – in a party-line 8–4 vote following a more than four-hour committee hearing.

As Jopseph Lord and Nathan Worcester report for The Epoch Times, with Democratic leaders indicating that they won’t give their backing to the measure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will need to rely mostly on his narrow Republican majority to pass the measure.

In a full vote of the House, Johnson can spare only one defection in a party-line vote, though some Democrats are expected to back the measure.

However, some issues with the Senate proposal could lead Republicans to oppose the measure.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a longtime budget hawk and a particular opponent of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which falls under DHS, voted against the previous funding measure due to its funding for CISA, and could oppose the stopgap measure as well.

Other Republicans have pushed leadership to attach the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to the measure.

Leadership has resisted these demands, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says would make the bill dead on arrival in the upper chamber. The bill reported out of the Rules Committee didn’t include the SAVE Act.

Nevertheless, the passage of the legislation through the Rules Committee—which includes conservative skeptics of the bill such as Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas)—is a good sign for Republican leaders on the funding package’s prospects.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) downplayed the difficulties in comments to reporters on Monday.

“They all come down to the wire, and then we get our business done,” Scalise said.

The bill at issue would provide full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.

Democrats are demanding reforms to DHS and its subsidiary immigration enforcement agencies before they’ll support a full-year funding measure, though many House Democrats—including leadership—have expressed opposition to extending DHS funding at all before these reforms are addressed.

Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), meanwhile, voiced opposition to the measure at the hearing.

“I will not vote for business as usual while masked agents break into people’s homes without a judicial warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” he said, referencing ongoing disputes related to the executive branch’s use of self-issued administrative warrants, rather than court-issued judicial warrants, to enter homes.

However, one Democrat—House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)—indicated at the hearing that she would break with her party to back the measure.

“I will support this package,” DeLauro said at the hearing, referencing the five full-year funding bills attached to the package that have Democratic support.

She said that without the funding extension for DHS, Democrats “won’t be able to bring the kinds of pressure” needed to add reforms to the full-year DHS funding package.

McGovern explained his opposition in response to a question from The Epoch Times outside the hearing room.

“Personally, [I] cannot bring myself to go for one more cent for ICE without some serious guardrails put in place, and I think the leverage we have is now more so than two weeks from now,” McGovern said.

Johnson has said he is “confident” that the partial shutdown will end with the Tuesday vote, despite indicating that House Democrats haven’t given their support to pass the Senate-passed measure.

“We have a logistical challenge of getting everyone in town, and because of the conversation I had with Hakeem Jeffries, I know that we’ve got to pass a rule and probably do this mostly on our own,” Johnson told NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

House Democratic leadership has not indicated support for the measure publicly, despite it having been backed by Schumer and other Senate Democrats.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told ABC’s “This Week” that it’s clear that the “Department of Homeland Security needs to be dramatically reformed.”

“Masks should come off,” he said. “Judicial warrants should absolutely be required consistent with the Constitution, in our view, before DHS agents or ICE agents are breaking into the homes of the American people or ripping people out of their cars.”