🤖 Agent Intel: DeepSeek Shakes Up the AI Market

👋🏻 Welcome to AI Agent Insider!

Your essential guide to agentic AI.

Hey, it's Matt. Every week, I help ambitious professionals like you:

• Stay ahead of agentic AI breakthroughs

• Find tools that deliver real value

• Transform hype into action

In this edition:

• DeepSeek's AI Revolution: Amazing Price, Hidden Risks

• OpenAI's Big Week: Four Releases in < 7 days

• Your DeepSeek Safety Guide: Use It Without Getting Burned

• Agent Builder Boom: New Tools Hit the Market

Let’s dive in! 👇🏼

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🕵🏻‍♂️ AI Agent Intel of the Week

🤖 Welcome, Agent Insider:
Your briefing begins in 3, 2, 1…

🔎 Top Agentic News

• OpenAI launches Operator, an AI agent that performs tasks autonomously

  • It’s currently in research preview. However, early adopters report that Operator requires constant monitoring to prevent frequent screw ups… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • It also requires the $200/month pro subscription to even try… ugh…

Why stop at one release?

• OpenAI also released the most cost efficient model in its reasoning series to date, OpenAI o3-mini, on Friday (Undoubtedly feeling the pressure from Deepseek R1’s release!)

  • Word on the street: o3-mini is a coding beast (video) 👀 

• OpenAI also introduced ChatGPT Gov, a tailored version of its ChatGPT chatbot aimed at U.S. government agencies, enabling secure access to advanced models through a Microsoft Azure cloud instance.

• Apparently, three releases in the same week weren’t enough so, yesterday, OpenAI one up’d themselves with another release:
  a “deep research” agent

  • Again, it also requires the $200/month pro subscription to even try… double ugh…

• Postman Launches AI Agent Builder to Streamline Agent Development

• Pinecone launches AI agent-building API to simplify RAG development

• Block launches “Codename Goose”: a platform for building AI agents released by Twitter OG Jack Dorsey’s financial tech and media company, Block (formerly Square)

  • Heads up: If you don’t code, this Goose ain’t for you (yet)

👀 ICYMI

• Cisco envisions an ‘Internet of Agents’ for secure AI agent collaboration

  • Go deeper: Cisco blog

• In mid-January, Microsoft released its latest version of Autogen

  • Autogen is an open-source framework that allows developers to build LLM applications by composing multiple agents to converse with each other to accomplish tasks

 🚨 What you need to know about DeepSeek R1 

Let’s start here… 👇🏼

Well, that sounds terrible 😬… But this doesn’t mean it can’t be used safely:

• ”The ONLY way to run Deepseek”... Want to kick the tires on DeekSeek safely? Then you need to watch this. No, seriously. Watch this.
  Why? See first video above…

• Okay, maybe not the only way: Perplexity lets you try DeepSeek R1 without the security risk (but it's still censored)

  • Go Deeper: About the R1 model used for Pro Search on Perplexity

🔥 Takes

• How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead

🍿 Worth Watching

• “AI Agents And The Path To AGI": A recent interview with OpenAI's former Chief Research Officer, Bob McGrew

🤓 Talk nerdy to me

• Thin Agents: Creating Lean AI Services with Local Fine-Tuned LLMs

🧰 Agentic AI tools of the Week

If any of these tools feel too technical for your background, don’t be intimidated.
Try, learn, grow.

• Postman AI Agent Builder: Effortlessly discover, test, and integrate APIs and LLMs to accelerate agent development.

  • If you’re already a fan of Postman, then you just might love this.

• Vapi AI: Build voice agents with ultra-low latency

• Ottogrid AI: Agentic AI tool that helps enrich lists, research companies, or read hundreds of documents in minutes, all through a native table interface

  • Go deeper: Ottogrid quickstart guide

🧠 Learning Resources of the Week

• Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential

  • 👆🏻this McKinsey Report just dropped. Highly recommend.

• The AI Agent Stack in 2025: How It’s Built Today

• Build AI agents with the Postman AI Agent Builder

PARTNER OF THE WEEK

Writer RAG tool: build production-ready RAG apps in minutes

• Writer RAG Tool: build production-ready RAG apps in minutes with simple API calls.

• Knowledge Graph integration for intelligent data retrieval and AI-powered interactions.

• Streamlined full-stack platform eliminates complex setups for scalable, accurate AI workflows.

Learn more about our production ready RAG tooling here.