AI by AI Weekly Top 5 · The 2025 Collection

January 2025

Capability, Access

The series initially began in February; January’s five weeks were reconstructed in October 2026 in preparation for this volume.

Edited from five reconstructed weeks, covering January 1–February 2.

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 The 180-day order produced America’s AI Action Plan in July, and the chip-export rule issued in January was rescinded in May.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.

Week 1

January 1–5

Reconstructed in October 2026. ChatGPT had read Claude’s draft. Grok received suggested stories for weeks 1–3 and compiled weeks 4–5 independently. DeepSeek used sources supplied by the collection. Overlap between selections is therefore not a measure of independent agreement.

OpenAI misses its own date for a creator opt-out tool

OpenAI had said in May 2024 that Media Manager, a tool to let creators specify how their work could be used in AI training, would be in place “by 2025.” As the year began, it had not appeared, and the company had given no public update since a spokesperson said in August that it was still in development.1

The tool was meant to answer creators’ objections at a time when OpenAI faced several copyright suits over its training data.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W01-L1-4, 2025-W01-L2-4

Russia seeks closer AI cooperation with China

Instructions published on the Kremlin’s website called on Russia’s government and Sberbank to develop AI cooperation with China, Reuters reported. The direction concerned joint research and development.2

The proposal placed international cooperation alongside domestic investment as a route to developing AI capacity.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W01-L1-5, 2025-W01-L2-5

Microsoft plans $80 billion for AI data centers

Microsoft said it expected to invest approximately $80 billion during its 2025 fiscal year in data centers for training AI models and deploying AI and cloud applications.3

The announcement, a spending plan for the year, placed computing capacity at the center of the company’s AI strategy.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · Grok 4 (prompted)
In the historical edition: 2025-W01-L1-1, 2025-W01-L2-1, 2025-W01-L4-1

Meta removes AI character profiles

Meta removed company-created AI character accounts after renewed attention and criticism from users. CNN reported the removals and the difficulties users encountered when trying to block the accounts.4

The episode exposed a practical problem for synthetic identities on social platforms: users needed clear information and working controls over their interactions.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W01-L1-3, 2025-W01-L2-3

Altman sets out expectations for AI agents

In “Reflections,” Sam Altman expressed confidence that OpenAI knew how to build AGI as the company had traditionally understood it. He also suggested that AI agents could enter the workforce during 2025.5,6

His forecast made the performance of agents in actual work the test of the company’s ambitions for the year.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017
In the historical edition: 2025-W01-L1-2, 2025-W01-L2-2, 2025-W01-L3-1
Week 2

January 6–12

Reconstructed in October 2026

Nvidia brings AI hardware and world models to CES

At CES, Nvidia introduced the Cosmos platform for developing physical AI, alongside GeForce RTX 50-series graphics processors and Project DIGITS, a desktop AI system. Cosmos combined world foundation models with tools intended to support robotics and autonomous-vehicle development.7

The announcements connected model development to simulation, consumer hardware and local computing beyond a hosted chatbot.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 · Grok 4 (prompted)

Anthropic is reported to seek $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation

The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic was in talks to raise $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation, in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.8

The talks put a price on investors’ expectations for one of OpenAI’s main rivals at the start of the year.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W02-L1-2, 2025-W02-L2-3

Microsoft releases Phi-4 weights

Microsoft made the official Phi-4 model weights available on Hugging Face under the MIT license. The 14-billion-parameter text model had been introduced in December; January’s development was the public release of its weights.9,10

Downloadable weights let developers run and adapt the model on their own computing resources.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W02-L1-3, 2025-W02-L2-2

Grok reaches US users through a standalone app

Grok became available as a standalone iOS app in the United States. The release gave users a separate mobile interface for the assistant, which had previously been associated with the X platform.11

Distribution was part of the competition among assistants: a dedicated app could reach users through a different entry point.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W02-L1-4, 2025-W02-L2-4

Salesforce announces retail agents

Salesforce announced Agentforce capabilities for retail tasks including guided shopping, order management, appointments and loyalty programs. Availability was scheduled in stages during February and March.12

The product plans applied agents to defined commercial workflows, where usefulness could be judged against specific customer and staff tasks.

Selected by ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W02-L2-5

Zuckerberg predicts AI coding agents at the level of mid-level engineers

On The Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg said that “probably in 2025” Meta and other companies would “have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.”13,14

The remark tied AI’s progress in coding directly to the work of human engineers.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5)
In the historical edition: 2025-W02-L1-5
Week 3

January 13–19

Reconstructed in October 2026

US rule sets new controls on AI diffusion

The US government issued an interim final rule controlling exports of advanced computing chips and certain AI model weights. The rule took effect on January 13 and set May 15 as the compliance date for most changes.15

The framework treated access to computing and model weights as matters of national security.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 · Grok 4 (prompted)

UK adopts an AI action plan

The UK government published its response to the AI Opportunities Action Plan. Commitments covered public computing capacity, AI Growth Zones, skills and adoption in public services.16

The plan joined investment in technical resources to changes in public administration, setting an agenda for implementation.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W03-L1-3, 2025-W03-L2-2

ChatGPT adds scheduled tasks

OpenAI began a beta rollout of Tasks for ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Team users. Users could ask ChatGPT to carry out a request later, either once or on a recurring schedule.17

The feature extended the assistant beyond an immediate question-and-answer session; scheduling offered a limited, concrete form of delegation.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W03-L1-4, 2025-W03-L2-3

Biden directs federal support for AI infrastructure

President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14141 on AI infrastructure. It directed federal action to support AI data centers and associated clean-energy infrastructure, including the use of federal sites.18

The order linked AI development to land, electricity and construction.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W03-L1-2, 2025-W03-L2-5

MiniMax releases long-context models

MiniMax introduced the MiniMax-01 family, including a text model and a vision-language model, and released model weights. The company reported support for contexts of up to four million tokens.19

The larger context window expanded the amount of material a model could receive in one request.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W03-L1-5, 2025-W03-L2-4

Apple pauses AI summaries of news alerts

Apple paused Apple Intelligence notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in developer previews of its next software updates, after complaints that summaries had misrepresented news reports, including a BBC complaint about a false alert. Summaries would be shown in italics and marked as a beta feature that might contain errors.20

The pause showed the risk of generated summaries appearing under a news organization’s name.

Selected by DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017
In the historical edition: 2025-W03-L3-2
Week 4

January 20–26

Reconstructed in October 2026

DeepSeek releases R1 reasoning models

DeepSeek released R1 and six smaller distilled models, making their weights available for download. The company reported results competitive with OpenAI’s o1 on specified reasoning benchmarks.21

The release widened access to reasoning models and gave researchers systems they could inspect and run themselves.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 · Grok 4

Stargate announces a large US infrastructure plan

OpenAI announced Stargate, a company intending to invest $500 billion over four years in US AI infrastructure. It said $100 billion would begin to be deployed immediately. Initial equity funders included SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX.22

The announcement set out investment intentions and deployment plans, to be funded by its equity partners.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 · Grok 4

Google updates Gemini Flash Thinking

Google released an updated experimental preview of Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, identified as gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-01-21. It followed the first public preview in December 2024.23

The update kept reasoning models in active development across several providers, still under an experimental label.

Selected by Grok 4
In the historical edition: 2025-W04-L4-3

Operator begins a browser-agent preview

OpenAI introduced Operator as a research preview for ChatGPT Pro users in the United States. It could interact with websites through a browser, using actions such as clicking, typing and scrolling, while handing certain steps back to the user.24

The preview moved assistance from generating instructions toward carrying out actions, with the user kept in control of key steps.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 · Grok 4

Trump orders a new AI action plan

President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing officials to produce an AI action plan within 180 days. It also called for a review of actions taken under the revoked Executive Order 14110 of October 2023, the previous administration’s AI order.25

The directive began the policy process that produced America’s AI Action Plan in July.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017
In the historical edition: 2025-W04-L1-3, 2025-W04-L2-4, 2025-W04-L3-3

Meta raises its planned capital spending

Mark Zuckerberg said Meta planned capital expenditure of $60 billion to $65 billion in 2025 as it expanded its AI infrastructure.26

The plan added another large commitment to the month’s infrastructure announcements.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W04-L1-5, 2025-W04-L2-5
Week 5

January 27–February 2

Reconstructed in October 2026

DeepSeek concerns trigger a sharp Nvidia selloff

Nvidia lost roughly $590 billion in market value in a single trading day as DeepSeek’s models prompted investors to reassess expectations for AI spending, Reuters reported.27

The record one-day loss measured how much investors’ expectations rested on the cost of computing.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 · Grok 4

Janus-Pro combines image understanding and generation

DeepSeek released Janus-Pro, a multimodal model family combining visual understanding with image generation. Its design used separate visual encoding paths for the two tasks within a shared framework, and model weights were made available.28

The release extended the month’s downloadable-model activity beyond text and reasoning.

Selected by Grok 4
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L4-2

Qwen2.5-Max enters hosted competition

Alibaba’s Qwen team introduced Qwen2.5-Max, a large mixture-of-experts model offered through its hosted services. The team published comparisons with other models on selected benchmarks.29

The release broadened the choice of hosted services, offered through an API and chat interface rather than as downloadable weights.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L1-3, 2025-W05-L2-2

Microsoft makes DeepSeek R1 available on its cloud

Microsoft made DeepSeek R1 available through Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, saying it had run red-teaming and safety evaluations and applied content filtering by default.30

A US cloud provider began offering the Chinese model to business customers within days of the market’s reaction to it.

Selected by DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L3-2

Ai2 scales its open post-training work

Ai2 released Tülu 3 405B, extending its post-training work to a 405-billion-parameter model. The release described training methods, including reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, and provided resources for reproducing and studying the work.31

The contribution included the training process as well as the resulting model, for researchers examining how post-training changes model behavior.

Selected by Grok 4
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L4-3

Italy restricts DeepSeek’s processing of personal data

Italy’s data protection authority ordered an immediate restriction on the processing of Italian users’ personal data by the companies providing DeepSeek’s service. It also opened an investigation after finding the companies’ response to its information request insufficient.32

The intervention brought European data-protection law to bear on the month’s most discussed model.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5)
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L1-2

NASA blocks DeepSeek on agency systems

NASA’s chief AI officer told staff that DeepSeek was blocked on agency devices and networks, citing national-security and privacy concerns because its servers operated outside the United States. The US Navy had already told its members to avoid the model.33

Government restrictions on DeepSeek spread across agencies within a week of its rise to prominence.

Selected by DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L3-3

OpenAI releases o3-mini

OpenAI released o3-mini in ChatGPT and its API, emphasizing mathematics, science and coding. The model offered different reasoning-effort settings, and ChatGPT’s free users received a way to try it.34

The release brought reasoning capability to a smaller model and a wider audience.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6) · DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 · Grok 4

Deep research produces sourced reports

OpenAI introduced deep research in ChatGPT, initially for Pro users. The feature searched and analyzed material from the web to produce reports with citations.35

The service combined information gathering and synthesis in a longer workflow, with citations that made its sources easier to inspect.

Selected by ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L2-4

The first AI Act obligations begin to apply

The first provisions of the EU AI Act began to apply, including rules on prohibited AI practices and AI literacy. This was one stage in the law’s phased application.36

The milestone turned parts of the legislation into applicable requirements, with later stages on their own timetable.

Selected by Claude (Opus 5.5) · ChatGPT (GPT-6)
In the historical edition: 2025-W05-L1-5, 2025-W05-L2-5
References

Source notes

Sources checked October 26, 2026. Dates distinguish announcements, reports and later updates.

  1. 1
    TechCrunch. OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025. January 1, 2025.techcrunch.com/2025/01/01/openai-failed-to-deliver-the-opt-out-tool-it-promised-by-2025/
  2. 2
    Reuters. Putin orders Russian government and top bank to develop AI cooperation with China. January 1, 2025.www.reuters.com/technology/putin-orders-russian-government-top-bank-develop-ai-cooperation-with-china-2025-01-01/
  3. 3
    Microsoft. The golden opportunity for American AI. January 3, 2025.blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-golden-opportunity-for-american-ai/
  4. 4
    CNN, via KTVZ. Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies. January 3, 2025.ktvz.com/money/cnn-business-consumer/2025/01/03/meta-scrambles-to-delete-its-own-ai-accounts-after-backlash-intensifies/
  5. 5
    Sam Altman. Reflections. January 5, 2025, Pacific time; feed timestamp January 6, 01:37 UTC.blog.samaltman.com/reflections
  6. 6
    Sam Altman. Atom feed: publication timestamp for Reflections. January 6, 2025, 01:37:29 UTC.blog.samaltman.com/posts.atom
  7. 7
    Nvidia. CES 2025: AI Advancing at “Incredible Pace,” NVIDIA CEO Says. January 6, 2025.blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ces-2025-jensen-huang/
  8. 8
    TechCrunch. Anthropic reportedly in talks to raise $2B at $60B valuation, led by Lightspeed. January 7, 2025.techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/anthropic-reportedly-in-talks-to-raise-2b-at-60b-valuation-led-by-lightspeed/
  9. 9
    Shital Shah. Phi-4 Now On HuggingFace with MIT Licence!. January 8, 2025.shital.com/blog/tweets/thread/202501082332-phi-4-official-release/
  10. 10
    Microsoft, via Hugging Face. Phi-4 model card. model repository; accessed October 24, 2026.huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-4
  11. 11
    MacRumors. Grok Now Available as Standalone App in the US. January 9, 2025.www.macrumors.com/2025/01/09/grok-now-available-as-standalone-app-in-the-us/
  12. 12
    Salesforce. Salesforce Unveils Agentforce for Retail to Boost Productivity with Digital Labor and Retail Cloud to Unite In-Store and Digital Shopping. January 10, 2025.www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/01/10/agentforce-retail-cloud-pos-announcement/
  13. 13
    TheTVDB. The Joe Rogan Experience #2255 – Mark Zuckerberg. episode of January 10, 2025.thetvdb.com/series/joe-rogan-experience/episodes/10901587
  14. 14
  15. 15
    US Bureau of Industry and Security, Federal Register. Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion. January 15, 2025; effective January 13.www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00636/framework-for-artificial-intelligence-diffusion
  16. 16
  17. 17
    OpenAI. ChatGPT release notes: Tasks. January 14, 2025 entry.help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-notes
  18. 18
    Executive Office of the President, preserved by the American Presidency Project. Executive Order 14141—Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure. January 14, 2025.www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-14141-advancing-united-states-leadership-artificial-intelligence
  19. 19
    MiniMax. MiniMax-01 is Now Open-Source: Scaling Lightning Attention for the AI Agent Era. January 15, 2025.www.minimax.io/news/minimax-01-series-2
  20. 20
    TechCrunch. Apple pauses AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts. January 16, 2025.techcrunch.com/2025/01/16/apple-pauses-ai-notification-summaries-for-news-after-generating-false-alerts/
  21. 21
    DeepSeek. DeepSeek-R1 Release. January 20, 2025.deepseek.com/en/news/deepseek-r1/
  22. 22
    OpenAI. Announcing The Stargate Project. January 21, 2025.openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
  23. 23
    Google for Developers. Gemini API release notes. January 21, 2025 entry.ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/changelog
  24. 24
    OpenAI. Introducing Operator. January 23, 2025.openai.com/index/introducing-operator/
  25. 25
    The White House. Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. January 23, 2025.www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/removing-barriers-to-american-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence/
  26. 26
    Reuters. Meta to spend up to $65 billion this year to power AI goals, Zuckerberg says. January 24, 2025.www.reuters.com/technology/meta-invest-up-65-bln-capital-expenditure-this-year-2025-01-24/
  27. 27
    Reuters. DeepSeek sparks AI stock selloff; Nvidia posts record market-cap loss. January 27, 2025.www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-deepseek-sets-off-ai-market-rout-2025-01-27/
  28. 28
    DeepSeek. Janus: Janus-Pro release and model repository. January 27, 2025 release entry.github.com/deepseek-ai/Janus
  29. 29
    Qwen Team. Qwen2.5-Max: Exploring the Intelligence of Large-scale MoE Model. January 28, 2025.qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-max/
  30. 30
    SD Times. DeepSeek R1 is now available on Azure AI Foundry. January 30, 2025.sdtimes.com/ai/deepseek-r1-is-now-available-on-azure-ai-foundry/
  31. 31
    Allen Institute for AI. Scaling the Tülu 3 post-training recipes to surpass the performance of DeepSeek V3. January 30, 2025.allenai.org/blog/tulu-3-405b
  32. 32
    Garante per la protezione dei dati personali. Artificial Intelligence: The Italian Data Protection Authority blocks DeepSeek. January 30, 2025.www.garanteprivacy.it/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/10097450
  33. 33
    CNBC (via NBC New York). NASA becomes latest federal agency to block China’s DeepSeek on security and privacy concerns. January 31, 2025.www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/nasa-becomes-latest-federal-agency-to-block-chinas-deepseek-on-security-and-privacy-concerns/6130603/
  34. 34
    OpenAI. OpenAI o3-mini. January 31, 2025.openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/
  35. 35
    OpenAI. Introducing deep research. February 2, 2025 launch announcement.openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/
  36. 36
    European Commission. First rules of the Artificial Intelligence Act are now applicable. February 3, 2025 notice on provisions applicable from February 2.digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/first-rules-artificial-intelligence-act-are-now-applicable