Everything that mattered in AI, one page a week.

The antitrust agencies filed a statement of interest in Musk v. Altman (N.D. Cal., Case 4:24-cv-04722-YGR), the private suit in which Elon Musk alleges OpenAI and Microsoft illegally monopolized the AI market.

The government did not take a position on who should win. It argued that a single person serving on the boards of two competing companies can violate the antitrust laws even if they forgo one of the seats, and that the agencies read interlocks broadly enough to capture board observers and arrangements that survive nominal resignation. At issue in the filing is Reid Hoffman's simultaneous participation on the OpenAI and Microsoft boards.

Microsoft Research released the complete weights of Phi-4 to Hugging Face under an MIT license. Phi-4 is a 14B-parameter dense decoder-only model with a 16K-token context window, trained on 9.8T tokens over 21 days on 1,920 H100-80Gs, and it had been available before that only through Azure AI Foundry.

The training recipe is the point: the technical report says Phi-4 is built around synthetic data throughout pre-training and substantially surpasses its teacher model, GPT-4, on STEM-focused question answering — evidence that small, data-curated models beat scale-for-scale assumptions.

CNBC reported that Anthropic was in late-stage talks to raise as much as $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation, with Lightspeed Venture Partners leading, confirming earlier Wall Street Journal reporting.

It is a more than threefold re-rating in about a year for a company that sells closed frontier models on a safety-first pitch, and it lands in the same five days as Sky-T1's $450 reasoning fine-tune and Phi-4's MIT-licensed weights.

The UK Ministry of Justice published plans to make creating sexually explicit deepfake images a criminal offence, not only sharing them, with the offences to be carried in the Crime and Policing Bill.

The package also creates offences for taking an intimate image without consent and for installing or adapting equipment with intent to enable it, each carrying up to two years' custody. The deepfake offences cover images of adults, with children already protected by existing law. Ministers warned that platforms hosting the content will face tougher scrutiny and significant penalties.

Nvidia's CES keynote covered the full stack a model shop needs. Project DIGITS is a Grace Blackwell GB10 desktop system with 128GB of unified coherent memory that runs up to 200B-parameter models locally — two units linked for 405B — priced around $3,000, built to prototype and fine-tune locally then move to datacenter capacity. The Blackwell RTX 50 series arrived with the RTX 5090 at $1,999 and RTX 5080 at $999.

For builders, the Cosmos world foundation model platform shipped its first wave openly under Nvidia's open model license on Hugging Face and NGC for robotics and autonomous-vehicle synthetic data, alongside the announced Llama Nemotron and Cosmos Nemotron families for enterprise agents and the AI Blueprints built around them.

Apple agreed to pay $95 million in cash to settle a proposed class action alleging its Siri assistant violated users' privacy by recording private conversations after accidental activations and sharing them with third parties.

The preliminary settlement was filed in Oakland federal court and needs approval from US District Judge Jeffrey White. The class period runs from 17 September 2014 to 31 December 2024, and members may receive up to $20 per Siri-enabled device, with the class estimated in the tens of millions. Apple denied wrongdoing. A parallel suit over Google's Voice Assistant, brought by the same plaintiffs' firms, is pending in the same district.

The Treasury rule implementing Executive Order 14105 — 31 CFR Part 850, published at 89 FR 90398 — became effective on 2 January 2025. It bars or requires notification for certain US-person investments in Chinese, Hong Kong and Macau companies working on semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and artificial intelligence, the three sectors the order designated as national-security technologies.

Law-firm analyses of the regime circulated that week as the compliance date hit.

President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia's government and its largest bank, Sberbank, to build cooperation with China in artificial intelligence.

The instructions were published on the Kremlin website as sanctions pressure continues to limit Russian access to Western AI hardware and models.

Nvidia completed its acquisition of Israeli AI infrastructure startup Run:ai after the European Commission granted unconditional approval earlier in December. The Commission had initially said the deal would require EU clearance and warned it could threaten competition in GPU-related markets.

Run:ai said it plans to make its GPU-virtualization and scheduling software open source so it can extend beyond Nvidia GPUs to the wider AI ecosystem. Nvidia holds roughly 80% of the AI GPU market.

DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3 with downloadable weights, and the analysis ran through the New Year week. The specification: 671B total parameters with 37B activated per token, a 128K context window, pre-trained on 14.8 trillion tokens using multi-head latent attention, DeepSeekMoE and an auxiliary-loss-free load-balancing strategy.

The report's own framing is that it outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models, and that the final training run needed only 2.788M H800 GPU-hours — the number behind the widely cited ~$5.6M compute estimate. Code is MIT-licensed; the weights ship under DeepSeek's own model license.