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Today (Monday, January 27, 2025) is the first day that you can file your tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But this year, many more Americans will have the option to use the IRSs Direct File system. Heres whos eligible for Direct File and things you need to know about the 2025 tax filing season. When is the 2025 tax filing season? The 2025 tax filing season begins today, Monday, January 27, 2025. That is the first day that people can file their tax returns for the 2024 tax year. This year, most people have until Tuesday, April 15, 2025, to file their 2024 returns. However, taxpayers may be eligible for filing extensions if they meet the necessary requirements. How can I file my 2024 tax return? There are many ways to file your 2024 tax return, including: By using an accountant. By using tax filing software like Turbo Tax or H&R Block. By mailing in a paper tax return. By using Direct File. That last optionDirect Fileis free for eligible taxpayers. What is Direct File? Direct File is an IRS program that allows eligible taxpayers to electronically file their tax returns directly with the IRS for free. Direct File launched a pilot program last year with a limited number of states. This year, the Direct File program is adding more states. One of the big benefits of Direct File is that, if you are eligible for it, you can use the program to file your taxes for freeno need to pay an accountant or pay for software from companies like Intuit or H&R Block just to file your taxes. Which states are eligible for Direct File? If you lived and worked in the following states, you may be able to use Direct File to file your federal taxes for 2024: Alaska Arizona California Connecticut Florida Idaho Illinois Kansas Maine Maryland Massachusetts Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina Oregon Pennsylvania South Dakota Tennessee Texas Washington state Wisconsin Wyoming Are there other eligibility requirements for Direct File? Yes. In addition to having to have lived and worked in the states above during 2024, Direct File can only be used if you have certain types of income. For example, the IRS states that Direct File can be used for W-2 wage income, 1099-INT interest income, and various other types of income. However, if you had some types of income, including gig economy, rental, or business income, you will not be able to use Direct File. Requirements to use Direct File can be found here. The IRS also offers an online tool that lets you check if you are eligible to use Direct File. The IRS estimates that up to 30 million people are eligible to use the Direct File program. Is Direct File an app? No, its an online tool. However, it is designed so that you can use it on your computer, phone, or tablet. How is Direct File different than Free File? Direct File is web-based software created by the IRS. The Free File program allows tax filers to use commercial software to file their taxes, according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS). Usually, taxpayers would need to pay for this commercial software, but if their income level is below a certain amount, the Free File program gives them access to the software for free. According to the IRS, to be eligible for Free File this tax season, you must have had a 2024 adjusted gross income (AGI) of $84,000 or less. In total, the IRS says it expects more than 140 million individual tax returns to be filed between today and the end of the tax filing season on April 15. How soon can I get my tax refund? That depends on how you file. According to the IRS, it takes up to 21 days to receive your refund payment if you filed electronically and use direct deposit. (Amended and paper returns will take longer.) The agency has an online tool called Where’s My Refund? where you can check the status of your refund, sometimes as soon as 24 hours after filing.
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Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok’s parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter.The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of a prior plan the artificial intelligence startup had presented to TikTok’s parent ByteDance on January 18, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.The first proposal, which ByteDance hasn’t responded to, sought to create a new structure that would merge San Francisco-based Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business and include investments from other investors.The new proposal would allow the U.S. government to own up to half of that new structure once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, said the person, who was not authorized to speak about the proposal. The person said Perplexity’s proposal was revised based off of feedback from the Trump administration.If the plan is successful, the shares owned by the government would not have voting power, the person said. The government also would not get a seat on the new company’s board.ByteDance and TikTok did not immediately responded to a request for comment.Under the plan, ByteDance would not have to completely cut ties with TikTok, a favorable outcome for its investors. But it would have to allow a “full U.S. board control,” the person said.Under the proposal, the China-based tech company would contribute TikTok’s U.S. business without the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app, according to a document seen by the Associated Press. In exchange, ByteDance’s existing investors will get equity in the new structure that emerges.The proposal seems to mirror a strategy Steven Mnuchin, treasury secretary during Trump’s first term, discussed Sunday on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futuresthat a new investor in TikTok could simply “dilute down” the Chinese ownership and satisfy the law. Mnuchin has previously expressed interest in investing in the company.“But the technology needs to be disconnected from China,” he added. “It needs to be disconnected from ByteDance. There’s absolutely no way that China would ever let us have something like that in China.”The Perplexity proposal comes as several investors are expressing interest in TikTok. President Donald Trump said late Saturday that he expects a deal will be made in as soon as 30 days.On a flight from Las Vegas to Miami on Air Force One, Trump also said he hadn’t discussed a deal with Larry Ellison, CEO of software maker Oracle, despite a report that Oracle, along with outside investors, was considering taking over TikTok’s global operation.“Numerous people are talking to me. Very substantial people,” Trump said. “We have a lot of interest in it, and the United States will be a big beneficiary. . . . I’d only do it if the United States benefits.”Under a bipartisan law passed last year, TikTok was to be banned in the United States by January 19 if it did not cut ties with ByteDance. The Supreme Court upheld the law, but Trump then issued an executive order to halt enforcement of the law for 75 days.Trump, on Air Force One, noted that Ellison lives “right down the road” from his Mar-a-Lago estate, but added, “I never spoke to Larry about TikTok. I’ve spoken to many people about TikTok and there’s great interest in TikTok.”TikTok briefly shut down in the U.S. a week ago, but went back online after Trump said he would postpone the ban. Trump had unsuccessfully attempted a U.S. ban of the platform during his first term. But he has since reversed his position and has credited the platform with helping him win more young voters during last year’s presidential election.TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration January 20, along with some other tech leaders who’ve been forging friendlier ties with the new administration.Congress voted to ban TikTok in the U.S. out of concern that TikTok’s ownership structure represented a security risk. The Biden administration argued in court for months that it was too much of a risk to allow a Chinese company to control the algorithm that fuels what people see on the app. Officials also raised concerns about user data collected on the platform.However, to date, the U.S. hasn’t provided public evidence of TikTok handing user data to Chinese authorities or allowing them to tinker with its algorithm. Haleluya Hadero and Christopher Rugaber, AP Business Writers
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Americas AI industry was left reeling over the weekend after a small Chinese company called DeepSeek released an updated version of its chatbot last week, which appears to outperform even the most recent version of ChatGPT. But its not just DeepSeeks performance that is rattling U.S. artificial intelligence giants. Its the fact that DeepSeek built its model in just a few months, using inferior hardware, and at a cost so low it was previously nearly unthinkable. Heres what you need to know about DeepSeek. What is DeepSeek? DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence lab. It was founded in 2023 and is based in Hangzhou, in China’s Zhejiang province. It has released an open-source AI model, also called DeepSeek. The latest version of DeepSeek, called DeepSeek-V3, appears to rival and, in many cases, outperform OpenAIs ChatGPTincluding its GPT-4o model and its latest o1 reasoning model. However, the idea that the DeepSeek-V3 chatbot could outperform OpenAIs ChatGPT, as well as Metas Llama 3.1, and Anthropics Claude Sonnet 3.5, isnt the only thing that is unnerving Americas AI experts. Its that fact that DeepSeek appears to have developed DeepSeek-V3 in just a few months, using AI hardware that is far from state-of-the-art, and at a minute fraction of what other companies have spent developing their LLM chatbots. How much did DeepSeek cost to develop? Perhaps the most astounding thing about DeepSeek is the cost it took the company to develop. According to the companys technical report on DeepSeek-V3, the total cost of developing the model was just $5.576 million USD. Yes, thats million. For less than $6 million dollars, DeepSeek has managed to create an LLM model while other companies have spent billions on developing their own. (In training just GPT-4, OpenAI reportedly spent $100 million alone, Wired noted in 2023.) This raises several existential questions for Americas tech giants, not the least of which is whether they have spent billions of dollars they didnt need to in building their large language models. The high research and development costs are why most LLMs havent broken even for the companies involved yet, and if America’s AI giants could have developed them for just a few million dollars instead, they wasted billions that they didnt need to. But the fact that DeepSeek may have created a superior LLM model for less than $6 million dollars also raises serious competition concerns. When LLMs were thought to require hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build and develop, it gave Americas tech giants like Meta, Google, and OpenAI a financial advantagefew companies or startups have the funding once thought needed to create an LLM that could compete in the realm of ChatGPT. But if DeepSeek could build its LLM for only $6 million, then American tech giants might find they will soon face a lot more competition from not just major players but even small startups in Americaand across the globein the months ahead. Wasnt America supposed to prevent Chinese companies from getting a lead in the AI race? Yes. The Biden administration placed a number of export controls on AI technologies in the hopes that they would do just that. Some of the export controls forbade American companies from selling their most advanced AI chips and other hardware to Chinese companies. Some of Nvidias most advanced AI hardware fell under these export controls. Thats why DeepSeeks success is all the more shocking. The model was developed using hardware that was far from being the most advanced. DeepSeek trained its LLM using Nvidia’s H800 chipsa midrange AI chip. Despite being consigned to using less advanced hardware, DeepSeek still created a superior LLM model than ChatGPT. It is also much more energy efficient than LLMS like ChatGPT, which means it is better for the environment. In an interview with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas about DeepSeeks breakthroughs, Srinivas told CNBC, Necessity is the mother of invention. Because they had to figure out work-arounds, they actually ended up building something a lot more efficient. How have Americas AI giants reacted to DeepSeek? With shock and concern. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, To see the DeepSeek new model, its super impressive in terms of both how they have really effectively done an open-source model that does this inference-time compute, and is super-compute efficient. We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously. Microsoft has spent billions investing in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. Metas chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has a slightly different take. On Threads he stated that DeepSeeks success shows “Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones. DeepSeek has profited from open research and open source (e.g. PyTorch and Llama from Meta), LeCun wrote. They came up with new ideas and built them on top of other people’s work. Because their work is published and open source, everyone can profit from it. That is the power of open research and open source. How have investors reacted to the DeepSeek news? With some alarm. As of the time of this writing, major AI or AI-adjacent stocks are down in premarket trading. NVIDIA Corporation shares (Nasdaq: NVDA) are currently down over 10%. Nvidia’s success in recent years, in which it has become the worlds most valuable company, is largely due to companies buying as many of its most advanced AI chips as they can. However, if companies can now build AI models superior to ChatGPT on inferior chipsets, what does that mean for Nvidias future earnings? Shares of ASML Holding N.V. (Nasdaq: ASML) were also down 9% in premarket. ASML makes the equipment needed to produce advanced AI chips. Shares in Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT), OpenAIs biggest investor, were down over 6% in premarket. Can I use DeepSeek? Yep. DeepSeek can be used for freetheres no cost to use the most advanced DeepSeek-V3, which in most tests beats ChatGPTs o1 model. The latter costs $200 a month to use. DeepSeek can be used for free on the web. As you can see, its interface looks no different than the interfaces of other LLMS. You can also use DeepSeek for free on your smartphone via the dedicated DeepSeek app for iOS and Android. And in a sign of how DeepSeek has gained so much mindshare in the AI market over the past several days, the app is now the No. 1 app in Apples App Store.
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