> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.james-corcoran.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Weekly 3x3: Chips act is dead. Vance on AI opportunity. Hardware-aligned models.
- URL: https://www.james-corcoran.com/weekly-radar-01/
- Published: 2025-02-20T12:48:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-28T15:20:03.000Z
- Description: Stagflation risk is back on the agenda as chip policy wobbles and pressure builds to reshore manufacturing. In AI, leaders warn against overregulation, hyperscalers move into chip design, and research pushes long-context efficiency and reasoning under constraints.
- Author: James Corcoran
- Tags: Weekly 3x3

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> **MARKET MOVES**

**Fed says stagflation can't be ruled out | February 20th 2025**

The U.S. economy is facing the risk of so-called stagflation, when the labor market softens as inflation heats up, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President Alberto Musalem said on Thursday. [Market Watch](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-musalem-says-stagflation-trend-cant-be-ruled-out-40fb0537?ref=james-corcoran.com)

**The Chips Act may be dead. Another hurdle for semiconductor stocks | February 20th 2025**

Moves expected by the Trump administration to gut a key government scientific agency could bring another challenge for semiconductor and chip-equipment companies — and their stocks. [Market Watch](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-chips-act-may-be-dead-thats-another-big-hurdle-for-semiconductor-stocks-e37e818f?ref=james-corcoran.com)

**Tech's need for US manufacturing | February 20th 2025**

Alger says tech companies need to "start the engine" again on domestic manufacturing in the US. [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-02-20/tech-s-need-for-us-manufacturing-video?ref=james-corcoran.com)

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> **TECH TALK**

**JD Vance warns of overregulation | February 11th 2025**

US Vice President JD Vance delivered a keynote speech during the final day of the Paris AI Summit where he warned global leaders and tech CEOs that excessive regulation would kill the rapidly growing AI industry. [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64E9O1Gv99o&t=3s&ref=james-corcoran.com)

**Open AI designing chips in-house | February 10th 2025**

OpenAI is designing its first in-house AI chip. The chip design is expected to be finalized in the coming months, with TSMC handling manufacturing. [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-set-finalize-first-custom-chip-design-this-year-2025-02-10/?ref=james-corcoran.com)

**Salesforce launches AI energy usage benchmark | February 10th 2025**

To address AI's environmental impact, Salesforce, partnering with Hugging Face, Cohere, and Carnegie Mellon University, has launched the AI Energy Score. The tool aims to standardize energy efficiency reporting for AI models, providing a consistent way to measure and compare their footprint. [AI Magazine](https://aimagazine.com/ai-strategy/tracking-the-impact-of-ai-salesforces-ai-energy-score?ref=james-corcoran.com)

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> **RESEARCH RADAR**

**Native sparse attention: Hardware-aligned and natively trainable sparse attention | February 16th 2025**

NSA, a natively trainable sparse attention mechanism, achieves efficient long-context modeling by combining a dynamic hierarchical sparse strategy with hardware optimizations, delivering substantial speedups and comparable or superior performance to full attention models. [ArXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11089?ref=james-corcoran.com)

**How do LLMs acquire new knowledge? A knowledge circuits perspective on continual pre-training | February 16th 2025**

By studying how LLMs build their internal "knowledge networks" while learning, researchers discovered that new information is easier to grasp if it connects to existing knowledge, that this learning process happens in distinct phases (building then refining the network), and that LLMs learn from the ground up, which can help us design more effective training strategies. [ArXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11196?ref=james-corcoran.com)

**CRANE: Reasoning with constrained LLM generation | February 13th 2025**

Constraining LLM outputs for syntactic and semantic correctness can hurt their reasoning ability, but CRANE, a reasoning-augmented constrained decoding algorithm, addresses this by carefully expanding the output grammar, preserving reasoning capabilities while ensuring correct outputs, and achieving significant performance gains on challenging symbolic reasoning tasks. [ArXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09061?ref=james-corcoran.com)