1/9/2024: Nous Research lands $5m for Open Source AI

**Nous Research** announced a **$5.2 million seed financing** focused on **Nous-Forge**, aiming to embed transformer architecture into chips for powerful servers supporting real-time voice agents and **trillion parameter models**. **Rabbit R1** launched a demo at CES with mixed reactions. **OpenAI** shipped the **GPT store** and briefly leaked an upcoming personalization feature. A new paper on **Activation Beacon** proposes a solution to extend LLMs' context window significantly, with code to be released on GitHub. Discussions also covered **QLORA**, **fine-tuning**, **synthetic data**, and **custom architectures** for LLMs.