Over the past several weeks, researchers at AI hub Hugging Face have been working to reverse-engineer the reasoning model that briefly upended stock markets and roiled the tech industry.

Chinese lab DeepSeek was notably up-front with many of the details of how it built R1, but the dataset and some aspects of the training process remain a mystery. Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face co-founder and chief science officer, said the project has been working to fill in these gaps and in doing so, confirmed that the model is indeed the real deal in certain ways.

“We started the project with the idea of testing if their claims were true. Pretty quickly we saw that, yeah, they are true,” Wolf told Tech Brew. “It’s morphed at Hugging Face from a temporary weekend project to a long-term plan for now, at least.”

While DeepSeek’s sudden catapult into public discourse in January hasn’t cratered Big Tech stocks or popped bubbles in the way some investors initially feared, its permissive licensing has catalyzed the open-source AI community. Wolf called it a “ChatGPT moment” in terms of bringing mainstream attention to the sometimes-overlooked open side of AI development.

Keep reading here.—PK

Despite setbacks on the federal policy front, numerous EV charging initiatives are forging ahead.

So accessible: Ford confirmed that it’s now shipped all of the complimentary North American Charging Standard adapters to about 140,000 customers in the US who reserved one following the automaker’s decision to join the Tesla Supercharger network. Ford also unveiled a new NACS fast-charging adapter that it’s selling for $200.

Ford was the first automaker to announce its move to NACS, the charging standard Tesla uses; many other automakers later followed suit. Ford EV drivers have been able to use Tesla’s network, using an adapter, since last year.

Ford EV drivers in North America now have more than 180,000 public chargers available to them at more than 50,000 sites, according to the company.

“With the addition of the Ford NACS Fast Charging Adapter, when traveling on most highways in the US, Ford customers are within 18 miles of a DC fast charger through Ford,” the company’s Ken Williams, director of charging and energy services, wrote in a blog post.

Keep reading here.—JG

We know that the use of AI can be detrimental to the environment because it requires so much energy, but at the same time, many tech companies are using AI’s data-monitoring abilities to reduce their environmental footprint.

Today, Amazon joined that group when it announced three AI tools—FlowMS, Base Building Advanced Monitoring (BBAM), and Advanced Refrigeration Monitoring—that detect system irregularities that humans can’t to reduce energy, water, and food waste in its buildings.

“We’re innovating with AI to help us find new ways to decarbonize even faster,” the company’s chief sustainability officer, Kara Hurst, said in a press release, “including inventing new solutions that continue to make our buildings more energy- and water-efficient.”

That energy efficiency is the result of FlowMS and BBAM, AI-powered tools that keep an eye on the energy consumption of HVAC systems and utilities in Amazon buildings. Both tools were built by the company’s Decision Science and Technology team, and are currently deployed at 120 Amazon sites, with more coming this year.

Keep reading here.—TC

Tariffs are disrupting supply chains, increasing costs, and threatening technological innovation. Learn how policy changes could impact pricing, R&D, and the future of emerging tech.