January was a busy month for the generative AI space, headlined by DeepSeek‘s R1 model launch — matching OpenAI’s o1 model capabilities at just 5-10% of the cost, while open-sourcing the technology.
The news rattled investor confidence in big tech’s massive infrastructure investments and flipped the open- vs. closed-source model debate on its head.
While some major players have held firm — with Microsoft and Meta defending their AI spending plans and Zuckerberg framing Meta’s substantial capex as a “strategic advantage” — leading model developer OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman admitted that it’s on “the wrong side of history.”
The month also marked a leap in agentic capabilities with OpenAI’s release of Operator, its first autonomous web-browsing agent. The tool, capable of handling complex web tasks like grocery ordering and form filling, expands ChatGPT’s utility beyond the chat interface into real-world, task-specific applications with early partners including DoorDash and Instacart. 