Last Week in AI #230 - 2025 Retrospective, Nvidia buys Groq, GLM 4.7, METR
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Jan 7, 2026 Nvidia's monumental $20 billion acquisition of Groq is driving advancements in AI hardware and inference technology. New York's RAISE Act aims to set safety regulations for AI systems, marking a significant legislative move in the sector. The launch of GLM 4.7 represents a major leap in open-source AI coding capabilities. Concerns arise over the escalating costs of long-horizon AI tasks, prompting debates on efficiency and ROI in the evolving AI landscape. Plus, insights into innovative approaches like activation oracles reveal intriguing new methods for model interpretability.
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2025's Core AI Trends
- 2025's defining trends were reasoning models, agent tooling, and advanced image editing like Not A Banana Pro.
- These trends set the research and product focus for the rest of the year.
Interpretability's Evolving Role
- Labs shifted alignment strategies away from pure mechanistic interpretability toward diverse approaches.
- Interpretability produced useful techniques but many teams now explore alternatives like activation steering.
Hardware And ROI Became Central
- Hardware constraints reshaped strategy: ROI scrutiny, sovereign investors, and memory supply became central.
- Scaling now demands clearer economic returns and geopolitical positioning.