a calm before the storm

**Anthropic** is raising funds at a valuation up to **$40 billion** ahead of anticipated major releases. **OpenAI** launched new reasoning models **o1** and **o1-mini**, with increased rate limits and a multilingual MMLU benchmark. **Alibaba** released the open-source **Qwen2.5** model supporting 29+ languages, showing competitive performance to **gpt-4** at lower cost. **Microsoft** and **Blackrock** plan to invest **$30 billion** in AI data centers, with **Groq** partnering with Aramco to build the world's largest AI inference center. Robotics advances include Disney Research and ETH Zurich's diffusion-based motion generation for robots and Pudu Robotics' semi-humanoid robot. Slack and Microsoft introduced AI-powered agents integrated into their platforms. Research highlights include long-context scaling for **llama-2-70b** using Dual Chunk Attention and KV cache quantization enabling 1 million token context on **llama-7b** models.