As we mentioned earlier, the early days of a US government change invovle a lot of new orders and announcements. After a week in office the current US administration announced a plan to impose import tariffs on Taiwan for a variety of goods, including pharmaceuticals, steel, and chips. The tariff was reported to be 25% but could be as high as 100%. In further comments the president said the goal of the move was to lure companies back to the US to manufacture chips domestically. However, the CHIPS Act was specifically called out as being problematic because it simply gave money away instead of punishing companies with additional taxes to change their behavior. This is definitely a developing situation but lets dive in. Al, what’s the ultimate goal here? This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown.
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1:23 – Pure Storage Gets Hyperscale Win
Predictions of the demise of storage technologies are as regular as stories about the immortality of the same technology. The recent announcement that Pure Storage has a deal with an un-named hyperscaler to standardise on an all-flash storage design has brought the suggestion that hyperscalers may move on from spinning disk. All-flash arrays have been around for a while, is this really the end for hard drives in cloud storage?
Read More: Pure Storage’s recent hyperscaler ‘design win’ could be the death knell for disk storage
4:31 – Salt Typhoon Probe Potentially Disrupted
The first week of any new presidential administration is a flurry of activity. One of the items that slipped through the news coverage last week was an announcement that the US Department of Homeland Security has fired outside advisors on a number of advisory committees according to a report from Reuters. One of those review boards was in the middle of investigating the recent spate of hacks caused by the Chinese-aligned group Salt Typhoon that we’ve been covering here for the past few months. The letter reporting the firing of the committee said the members were free to reapply but other sources have said the investigation is effectively dead. Tom, is this the end of the Salt Typhoon probe?
Read More: US DHS fires outside advisers, sources say China probe disrupted
7:47 – AI Gets Trapped in a Maze
AI is very good at consuming information. What happens when a creative researcher makes it eat its own tail? In this case, this particular trap is named Napenthes, named after the carnivorous pitcher plant. The trap is designed to halt AI algorithms that are crawling the Internet for data without respecting limits on crawling sites. The system generates false links that contain garbage data and links back to other generated pages. While humans will be able to see through the ruse quickly the automated systems are locked into a loop that consumes resources and wastes time.
Read More: Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots
11:35 – Swedes Seize Ship Slashing Subsea Stuff
The Swedish authorities have impounded a vessel they suspect caused damage to an undersea internet cable last week. This comes after two other cables owned by Finland were damaged back in December. While the ship is flagged in Malta it is rumored to be a part of a shadow fleet owned and operated by Russian interests. These vessels are reported to have caused damage to a number of cable in the Baltic Sea and elsewhere. Authorities are unsure if the damage is deliberate or has been caused by saliors that are less than seaworthy.
Read More: Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage
14:56 – OpenAI Announces Operator Agent AI
Agentic AI is being promoted as the next big wave, where Generative AI tools get to not just talk to us, but to take action for us. OpenAI has added their agent technology called Operator as a part of their Pro Subscription. Can we trust these AI models to act on our behalf and in our best interest? Is this really the start of Skynet or just a way for OpenAI to try to get some revenue to offset the huge cost of training GPT4?
Read More: OpenAI launches Operator, an AI agent that performs tasks autonomously
18:23 – DeepSeek Causes Deep Thoughts Among Tech
This week has been dominated by discussion about a new company called DeepSeek. Their app shot to the number 1 spot on various app stores practically overnight. The magic behind the newest AI darling is more interesting. It utilizes a new model dubbed R1. DeepSeek says that R1 was developed similarly to OpenAI’s o1 model but was done for a reported $6 million. That number is a fraction of the cost of competing software from other companies. DeepSeek also released the model weights for free licensed under the open MIT license so everyone can have a look at them. The market took heed of this and promptly dropped on the news. There’s been a lot of discussion so far but analysts are urging caution because something isn’t quite right with the story.
Read More: DeepSeek panic triggers tech stock sell-off as Chinese AI tops App Store
23:53 – TSMC Tariffs Could Cause Chaos
As we mentioned earlier, the early days of a US government change involve a lot of new orders and announcements. After a week in office the current US administration announced a plan to impose import tariffs on Taiwan for a variety of goods, including pharmaceuticals, steel, and chips. The tariff was reported to be 25% but could be as high as 100%. In further comments the president said the goal of the move was to lure companies back to the US to manufacture chips domestically. However, the CHIPS Act was specifically called out as being problematic because it simply gave money away instead of punishing companies with additional taxes to change their behavior. This is definitely a developing situation but lets dive in.
Read More: Responding to Trump tariff threat, Taiwan says chip business is ‘win-win’
31:40 – The Weeks Ahead
AI Field Day 6 – January 29 – 30
Cisco Live EMEA 2025 – February 9 – 14
Cloud Field Day 22 – February 19 – 20
Networking Field Day 37 – March 19 – 20
Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day are now part of The Futurum Group.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is your look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.
