Do you really need a GPU or NPU for AI?

There's really only one topic for the Kettle this week - DeepSeek.What began as a Chinese hedge-fund venture has blown away nearly a trillion dollars in stock market value from Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta. But is it all it's cracked up to be? We have our doubts, as you can see below.Tim Prickett-Morgan on The Next Platform has been following this story before it broke, Tobias Mann went hands on with the LLM on Sunday and our editor Chris Williams has been testing the Chinese system extensively. As ever, your host Iain Thomson keeps things polite.

t's that time of the year again and the tech world heads to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show.It's been a bit subdued this year, since Trump's tariff plans could drastically raise the cost of hardware from China and elsewhere, but the usual suspects unveiled this year's kit.Chip vendors and laptop slingers have been out in force hoping to piggyback the AI wave and this year's upgrade cycle, and there's been the usual grab bag of wacky ideas from plucky young startups. You can see the full discussion below.Chewing the fat we have our editor-in-chief Chris Williams, reporters Brandon Vigliarolo and Tobias Mann, and hosted by Iain Thomson. Nicole Hemsoth Prickett produced the episode.

It's been a rough week for the AI industry as a series of stories have showed the latest LLM technology in a less than flattering light.For example, it appears that AI makes workers less productive, mainly because they haven't been trained how to use it. Gartner, usually a tech cheerleader, has pointed out that expensive AI PCs don't appear to be selling. But there's still Microsoft's latest AI enthusiasm from Ignite - Redmond has to recoup that $10 billion investment in ChatGPT somehow.There's some spirited discussion, and not a few chuckles on this week's Kettle episode, that you can watch in full below. Chewing the fat we have our editor Chris Williams, reporters Brandon Vigliarolo and Tom Claburn.

Join The Register's Editor in Chief, Chris Williams along with Reg reporters, Tom Claburn, Iain Thompson,  and Brandon Vigliarolo as they unpack the possibilities.

In this week's Kettle it's all about AI - or rather whether the tech industry can make the technology not only work, but pay its way as well. With trillions of dollars being spent investors are starting to get twitchy about what they can see for their money and patience. Meanwhile, Nvidia and others are facing what could be their peak year for a while as the market settles down a little - for the moment at least. You can see the full discussion below. After a busy week of financial results and announcement in the field we're joined by Tom Claburn, who's done a deep dive into the returns on investment for AI spending, Tim Prickett-Morgan from our sister site The Next Platform - and he knows the market better than most - and Tobias Mann, who has been trawling through the financial figures so you don't have to. This episode was directed and produced by Nicole Hemsoth Prickett. For those who prefer just the audio, the Kettle is available via RSS and MP3, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. So is the AI snake eating itself? Let us know in the forums.

In fact it was a tale of two outages. There was a minor Azure snafu but that was pretty much sorted by the time alerts to go out around the world after Crowdstrike pushed out what looks like a poorly coded and insufficiently tested update.While Apple and Linux users aren't directly effected, admins have been telling us all is not automatically well, since many networks have been taken down, meaning evn if your personal machine is working, it won't be able to do much without corporate data links. You can hear the whole story below.On this week's Kettle episode, we have Richard Speed in (a very hot) UK, plus our security expert Jessica Lyons and Brandon Vigliarolo who's been tracking the outage's global reach, and your host Iain Thomson.

With the continuing fallout from Snowflake now hitting over 100 million AT&T customers we discuss quite what is to be done. Constant vigilance is a given, but there's always the himan factor that ensures even the best security systems can be rolled over due to a single slip up. Then there's the promise of AI, or possibly the lack of promise. Machine learning was touted as a possible savior of the security industry, but - as with so much AI hype - the reality is looking somewhat less rosy. You can see the full discussion below. On this week's show we have Tobias Mann, Brandon Vigliarolo, The Register's security editor Jessica Lyons and your host Iain Thomson.

It's been a busy week in space, with Boeing's test pilots still stuck on the International Space Station thanks to their faulty capsule, and then being forced to take shelter from space debris. The debris came from RESURS-P1, a decommissioned Russian satellite launched in 2013, which broke up this week into over 100 observable pieces, all traveling at around 17,000mph. As the debris field approached the ISS astronauts were forced to take cover in a hardened safety chamber. Not that the station has long left, as NASA awarded a contract this week to deorbit the platform in 2030. By then there may be a replacement, and there'll almost certainly be a rival in the form of China, which is building its own space station. It's also been a good week for the Middle Kingdom, with the Chang'e-6 re-entry capsule bringing back the first samples from the far side of the Moon. You can see the full discussion below.

On Thursday the US government effectively banned Kaspersky security software on US servers on national security grounds, or at least made it useless given the lack of updates come September. Then, as we were filming this week's Kettle, 12 members of Kaspersky's C-suite were sanctioned as well - although not the Russian business' eponymous CEO Eugene. So what on earth is going on? Is this overreach by the US government or is there something more sinister going on? Joining us on this week's Kettle is our security editor Jessica Lyons to give us the full story, along with Tom Claburn to add in wisdom on the software side. As ever The Register's editor Chris Williams has pithy comment and your host is Iain Thomson, with producer Nicole Hemsoth Prickett turning chat into gold.

The tech world has been gathering in Taipei for the annual extravaganza that is Computex and all the chip makers have been strutting their stuff - one in particular. Nvidia didn't even book a spot at the show and instead host its own keynote where Jensen Huang, just crowned CEO of the world's second most valuable corporation, reflected on a stellar year and told us what's coming down the line. He then, rather bizarrely, wondered off to sign a young lady's chest. Such shenanigans weren't seen from other CEO. A fired-up Pat Gelsinger touted Intel's return to form and bought a new chip along with him. AMD, Qualcomm and Arm were also showing off the fruits of their labor and what OEMs have done with them. You can see the full discussion below and the squid discussed is here - although the image may haunt your dreams. On this week's show our man on the spot Simon Sharwood is joined by Joining us this week is Chris Williams and Tobias Mann, with your host Iain Thomson.