deepseek
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The Whale That Made Silicon Valley Count Again
DeepSeek did not win attention by building the biggest machine. It made scarcity into an engineering brief - then turned a research paper, an open model and a free app into a very expensive question for the rest of the AI industry.
OpenInfer
OpenInfer is a San Mateo-based AI infrastructure startup building an 'Inference OS for the agentic era' - software that runs large AI models and agents directly on the CPUs, GPUs and NPUs enterprises already own, from edge devices to private data centers, without cloud lock-in. Founded by ex-Meta and Roblox systems engineers Behnam Bastani and Reza Nourai, its OpenInfer Engine claims 2-3x faster inference than Llama.cpp and Ollama on distilled DeepSeek models and works as a drop-in replacement for existing endpoints. The company raised an $8M seed round in February 2025 and has since shipped Jean, a private email-native agentic AI system, and orchestration layers for heterogeneous compute.