AI News: May 9, 2026

1. Deepseek lines up China’s largest AI raise as Core Automation 4x’s in weeks

Deepseek / Core Automation. Deepseek is reportedly seeking up to $7.35B in what would be the largest funding round to date for a Chinese AI lab, with V4.1 slated for June. In parallel, a six-week-old startup founded by an ex-OpenAI researcher (Core Automation) is targeting a $4B valuation — both data points reinforcing that frontier-tier capital is still flowing despite the visible repricing on the debt side. Source

2. Cloudflare cuts 1,100 jobs and credits AI productivity

Cloudflare. Cloudflare announced its first significant layoff alongside record revenue, with leadership explicitly attributing the cuts to AI absorbing support and ops workloads. Whatever the actual driver, it is now publicly defensible for a profitable infrastructure company to frame headcount reductions as a downstream effect of its own AI deployment — a precedent the rest of the sector will reference. Source

3. PageIndex pushes a vectorless tree-RAG approach past 29k stars

VectifyAI. PageIndex builds hierarchical document trees and lets the LLM navigate them directly instead of retrieving with embeddings; the project reports 98.7% accuracy on the FinanceBench 10,231-question benchmark. The catch: the MCTS reasoning algorithm featured in the docs remains cloud-only in the open-source release, so what ships on GitHub is the structural retriever, not the full system. Source