January

4 events

Editors' summary

DeepSeek shakes the market, OpenAI puts $500 billion on the table

On 20 January, China's DeepSeek released R1, a reasoning model. Taken as strong performance at low cost, it drove US semiconductor stocks down sharply on the 27th. The assumption that results followed the compute you could afford now had a counter-example, and the argument concentrated there.

On the 21st, OpenAI announced the Stargate Project with SoftBank, Oracle and MGX, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture. President Donald Trump, inaugurated the day before, hosted the announcement at the White House.

OpenAI also shipped Operator, which drives a browser, on the 23rd, and o3-mini on the 31st.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record4 events

20
ModelDeepSeek / NVIDIA
DeepSeek R1 lands, and a week later the US market drops
DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model it presented as comparable to o1 at a fraction of the price — and it published the weights under an MIT licence, with the model's chain of thought visible to users. By 27 January it had passed ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app on the US iOS App Store, and that same day NVIDIA fell 17%, losing about $589 billion in market value: the largest single-day loss in the history of the US market. What moved the price was doubt about a premise — that staying at the frontier required buying the newest GPUs in bulk, indefinitely. A model read as high performance at low cost had become a question about the scale of the investment itself, and the American labs spent the following months revisiting their pricing and their positions on publishing weights.
21
BusinessOpenAI / Microsoft / Sam Altman / Masayoshi Son
Stargate Project announced with $500 billion AI infrastructure plan
The Stargate Project, a new AI infrastructure company funded by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, was announced. It plans to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States over four years, deploying an initial $100 billion immediately and starting construction in Texas. SoftBank holds financial responsibility and OpenAI operational responsibility, with Masayoshi Son as chairman. The announcement was made at the White House alongside President Trump. The same day, Microsoft announced a revised agreement replacing its position as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider with a right of first refusal on new capacity.
23
ProductOpenAI
OpenAI previews Operator, an agent that drives a browser
OpenAI released Operator, an agent that works by driving a browser itself, as a research preview. It handles things like booking travel and restaurants or shopping online, clicking buttons and filling forms the way a person would, in a dedicated browser window that shows what it is doing. It runs on Computer-Using Agent (CUA), a model combining GPT-4o's vision with reasoning trained through reinforcement learning. It went first to US subscribers on the $200-a-month Pro plan.
31
ModelOpenAI
o3-mini brings a reasoning model to free ChatGPT users
OpenAI released o3-mini, a reasoning model strong in science, maths and coding that it said responded 24% faster than o1-mini. It replaced o1-mini in ChatGPT and, for the first time, put a reasoning model in the hands of free users, subject to rate limits; Plus, Team and Pro users got higher limits, with Pro unlimited. It landed while DeepSeek R1, released on 20 January, was drawing attention, and was widely read as a response to it.

↑ 2025

DeepSeek R1 lands, and a week later the US market drops

Stargate Project announced with $500 billion AI infrastructure plan

OpenAI previews Operator, an agent that drives a browser

o3-mini brings a reasoning model to free ChatGPT users