I'm sure the real juicy stories happened behind closed doors at the frontier labs. But these were a few stories in the public eye that stood out to me.
Jan 6th: Nvidia releases open weight world models in the Cosmos family. • Generating short videos on my machine was a good time. These models felt like a new form of technology. It's hard to say where they will go.
Jan 20th: Deepseek releases the R1 paper showing how to do RL with language models (presumably the o1 secret sauce, more or less confirmed from open ai staff) • This was a big deal because it showed that the recipe for a very large jump in model capability (RLVR) was something you could write down on the back of a Waffle house napkin. It was very surprising how simple the concept seemed. If future AI techniques (like whatever SSI is working on for example) are this simple in retrospect than they will be impossible to keep secret. Some took this as a good sign for open source, but there's an alternative conclusion. Frontier labs can copy techniques just like any other player. This will probably lead to a situation where those who have the most compute dominate even further (Open AI and Anthropic).
January 21, 2025 - Datacenter build out: OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle held press conference in the white house detailing $500 billion Stargate AI-infrastructure initiative; its first campus was already under construction in Abilene, Texas, and began operating initial buildings in September 2025. xAI Colossus saga continues.
March 25th: Open AI released image generation models with much more accurate instruction following and higher fidelity on generating text: GPT‑4o generated images autoregressively. This went viral as the Studio Ghibli-style moment.
June 12th: The AI talent wars: Meta and Zuckerberg aqui-hired Scale for ~14 billion. The talent wars were on-going throughout the year but this particular event highlighted the extent of it.
Aug 5th: GPT-5 Released: this was more of a counter story: This model and the release were much less of an improvement than anticipated.
Nov 24th: Agentic reverberations: Clawdbot published by Steinberger.
December 19th - Codex. This was the first wave of the tsunami of agents in Q1 2026.