Welcome to The Daily AI Briefing! In today's rapidly evolving AI landscape, we're tracking major developments that could reshape the industry. From China's bold push for AI self-reliance to groundbreaking insights on AI interpretability from Anthropic's CEO, today's briefing covers the most significant AI news shaping our technological future. We'll also explore new tools, models, and opportunities emerging in the AI ecosystem. In today's episode, we'll cover China's national AI self-sufficiency initiative, Anthropic CEO's crucial insights on AI interpretability, practical applications of Grok's Workspace feature, Baidu's aggressive move with new Ernie AI models, trending AI tools, and the latest job opportunities in the field. Let's begin with China's push for AI self-reliance. President Xi Jinping has announced a comprehensive "national system" aimed at developing homegrown chips, software, and AI talent without relying on U.S. supply chains. This declaration makes AI self-sufficiency a national priority, with the government providing expanded policy support, IP protection, and research funding. Chinese chipmaker Huawei is reportedly testing an advanced chip as an alternative to NVIDIA processors, and rumors suggest the upcoming DeepSeek R2 will use Huawei chips instead of NVIDIA's. This accelerated effort demonstrates China's determination to gain AI leadership while proving independence from U.S. technology. Moving to insights on AI interpretability, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a thought-provoking blog highlighting the critical need for "mechanistic interpretability" in AI systems. Amodei argues that understanding models' inner workings could become humanity's essential safeguard as AI grows increasingly powerful. He emphasized that AI differs from traditional software because decision-making emerges organically, making operations unclear even to creators. Anthropic has already mapped over 30 million "features" in Claude 3 Sonnet, representing specific concepts the model can process. Amodei compared the ultimate goal to creating a reliable "AI MRI" for diagnosing models. Notably, he warned that AI is advancing faster than interpretability, potentially leaving us unprepared for sophisticated AI systems as early as 2026. For practical AI applications, a new tutorial demonstrates using Grok's Workspaces feature to create dedicated AI assistants for specific tasks like reviewing contracts and legal documents. Users can create specialized workspaces for legal document review, set detailed instructions, upload documents, and analyze them using "DeepSearch" for internet research and the "Think" button for deeper document analysis. The tutorial wisely advises users to redact confidential information before uploading sensitive legal documents and to verify AI responses to avoid potential hallucinations. In competitive AI model developments, Baidu has unveiled two upgraded, lower-cost ERNIE AI models and new tools at its Create 2025 event, directly challenging rival DeepSeek. ERNIE 4.5 Turbo costs just 11 cents per million input tokens, an 80% reduction from its predecessor and remarkably just 0.2% of GPT-4.5's cost. The ERNIE X1 Turbo reasoning model is priced at 14 cents per million input tokens, reportedly 75% cheaper than DeepSeek R1. Baidu claims the 4.5 Turbo's new multimodal capabilities surpass GPT-4o on benchmarks, while X1 Turbo outperforms DeepSeek's R1 and V3. Baidu also announced Xinxiang, a multi-agent system for over 200 different tasks, and Huiboxing, a digital avatar platform. Interestingly, Baidu founder Robin Li claimed the "market is shrinking" for text-based models like DeepSeek's R1. Several noteworthy AI tools are trending today, including Retellio, which transforms customer call recordings into podcasts; Adobe Firefly 4 and 4 Ultra, which are upgraded text-to-image models; Google's Music AI Sandbox for creating and editing music; and Tavus' Hummingbird-0, a state-of-the-art lip-sync video mode