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.