Introduction
January 2025
Major events
January was the month DeepSeek changed the conversation. On January 20 the Chinese laboratory released R1, a reasoning model competitive with OpenAI’s o1 on its reported benchmarks, with weights anyone could download. A week later Nvidia lost roughly $590 billion in market value in a single day as investors reassessed what AI might cost. Within days Microsoft offered R1 on its cloud, while Italy restricted DeepSeek’s use of personal data and NASA blocked it on agency systems.
The infrastructure plans of the month were the largest yet. Microsoft expected to spend about $80 billion on data centers in its fiscal year and Meta $60 billion to $65 billion in 2025; OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX announced Stargate, intending to invest $500 billion in US AI infrastructure. Washington changed hands in the middle of it. The outgoing administration issued a rule controlling exports of AI chips and model weights and an order supporting data centers on federal land; the incoming one ordered a new AI action plan within 180 days.
Patterns and trends
Capability and access moved together. Strong models arrived as downloadable weights (R1, Microsoft’s Phi-4, MiniMax-01, Janus-Pro, Ai2’s Tülu 3 405B), and governments answered with decisions about who could use them and where chips could go. Assistants also began to act on their own: ChatGPT gained scheduled tasks, OpenAI’s Operator previewed an agent that used a browser, deep research produced cited reports, and o3-mini brought reasoning to ChatGPT’s free users. Sam Altman suggested that AI agents could join the workforce in 2025, and Mark Zuckerberg that an AI would “probably” be able to do a mid-level engineer’s work that year.
Long-term threads
Several of the year’s longest stories begin here. Stargate grew through the year: to Norway at the end of July, five more US sites in September and Korean memory suppliers in October. The 180-day order produced America’s AI Action Plan in July, and the chip-export rule issued in January was rescinded in May. DeepSeek kept releasing open weights, with V3-0324 in March, V3.1 in August and V3.2-Exp in October, and its R1 research appeared in Nature in September. Operator’s browser agent was folded into ChatGPT agent in July. Nvidia’s January fall proved temporary: by June it was again the world’s most valuable company, and in October it became the first worth $5 trillion.