Quick lookback on technical AI themes of 2026:
(dataset: daily http://latent.space ainews title stories)
Jan:
- Ralph Loops
- RLMs
- Filesystems are all you need
- X LLM recsys open sourced
- X Grok Imagine #1 Video model
- Anthropic blocked OpenCode / OpenClaw
- MCP Apps
- Moltbook
- Apple picks Gemini for new Siri
- Notable models: Kimi K2.5
- Fast inference: OAI x Cerebras partnership
- Big raises: xAI @ $230B + SpaceX, OpenEvidence @ $12B
Feb:
- Codex App launch
- Claude Code 1 year anniversary
- Context Graphs
- Fast Inference: Taalas 17k tok/s/user Llama 3 8B
- Anthropic vs Deepseek/Moonshot/Minimax distillation accusation
- Notable models: Opus/Sonnet 4.6, 5.3 Codex and Codex Spark, Qwen-Image 2.0, Seedance 2.0, GLM-5, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Deep Think, Nano Banana 2
- Big raises: OpenAI @ $840B, Anthropic @ $380B, ElevenLabs @ $11B, Cerebras @ $23B
Mar:
- T3 Code
- Autoresearch
- Claude Code source leak
- Claude Cowork Dispatch
- OpenAI buys Astral
- Cloudflare-Next.js "Slop Fork"
- Meta buys Dreamer
- NVIDIA GTC: OpenClaw, Vera CPU, 1T sales backlog, "The Inference Inflection"
- ARC-AGI 3 introduced, SOTA models are 1%
- Notable models: GPT 5.4 unifies chat and codex, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite/Live, Nemotron 3 Super, Composer 2, MiniMax 2.7, Arcee’s Trinity-Large-Thinking
- Big Raises: Yann LeCun AMI Labs $1B seed
Apr:
- Claude Design
- OpenAI Symphony & Harness Engineering discourse - @LilianWeng writeup later
- OpenAI and Microsoft break up
- Tokenmaxxing fears
- Codex Superapp
- AIE Europe, AIEi Miami
- Hermes Agent gains traction w/ Manim skill
- Cyber: Anthropic Project Glasswing
- Notable models: Claude Mythos "Capybara", Opus 4.7, Muse Spark, Gemma 4, Kimi K2.6, GPT-Image-2, GPT 5.5 "Spud", DeepSeek v4 Pro/Flash Base/Instruct on Huawei Ascend, Poolside Laguna XS.2, Grok 4.3
- Big Raises: not much but Anthropic $19B->$30B ARR in one month...
May:
- Cyber: OpenAI Daybreak, Tanstack Mini-Shai Hulud
- FDE: OpenAI DeployCo, Ode by Anthropic
- OpenAI solve Erdos planar unit distance problem
- OpenAI deprecates finetuning
- "How to land a job at a frontier lab"
- Anthropic rents Colossus I from SpaceX for $5B/yr
- Thinking Machines Interaction Models (still underrated!!!)
- Notable models: GPT-Realtime-2/Translate/Whisper, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Omni, Antigravity 2.0, Opus 4.8, Cosmos 3, Minimax M3
- Big Raises: Fireworks @ $15B, Baseten @ $11B, Cognition @ $26B, Cerebras $60B IPO, Anthropic @ $965B
Jun:
- Claude Tag
- OpenAI Jalapeno
- "The Untrainable" - @saranormous
- Loopcraft: The Art of Stacking Loops
- Metaharnesses discourse? Flue v Eve
- Zai Prof @jietang predicts Open Fable by Dec
- "SpaceX is a $28B/yr neocloud" - @jaminball
- Anthropic-Fable White House issue (resolved)
- Notable models: GPT 5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna, Fable 5, Sonnet 5, MAI-Thinking-1 and MAI Family, Nemotron 3 Ultra, GLM 5.2, Reve 2/ Ideogram 4
- Big Raises: SpaceXai buys Cursor for $60B, Supabase @ $10B
Jul:
- AIE World's Fair 3
- OpenCode 2.0
- Cyber: OpenAI-HuggingFace incident
- Chinese Model ban discourse
- GPT 5.6 Luna 80% price cut
- Notable models: Grok 4.5, Opus 5, Muse Image, Thinky Inkling, Kimi K3, BFL FLUX 3, DeepSeek-v4-Flash-0731
- Big Raises:
Aug:
- EU AI text watermarking
- Microduck
- Megakernels
- Memory prices up 500% in 12 months
- How to steal a Reasoning Trace
- Grok @bot!
- OpenAI shuts off Cursor
- Fast Inference: AMD buys Taalas
- @andrewng stars AI Engineering series
- Hot Chips: Jalapeno, Cerebrase CS-5, Groq 3, Apple M6
- Demis steps down from CEO, & Dean et al leave
- Notable models: Qwen 3.8 Max, Muse Spark 1.2, Muse Glimmer, Grok 4.6, Gemini 3.7 Flash, GLM 5.3, @Fal H3 Max Live
- Big Raises: Stripe buys OpenRouter $7B, Poolside $12B reverse-execuhire to NVIDIA, NVIDIA buys HuggingFace for $13B
Sep:
- AIEi Paris
- OpenAI Navier-Stokes singularity
- collusion . wiki
- Yegge shuts down Gas Town
- AEF-1 standard for Third Party Evaluators
- Meta Muse App launch. Also new glasses and Charm
- OpenAI blocks Cursor
- OpenAI Dots
- Opus 5.5 explainer videos
- Pi 1.0 & Pi Durable
- Notable Models: Fable 5.1, Mythos 5.1, Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra, GPT Image 2.5, DeepSeek v4.1-Flash, @typesafeai Jev, MiMo-v2.6-Pro new Open SOTA, GPT 6.1 Sol & Ultrafast & Decisions API, Gemini 4 Argon
- Big Raises: Cognition @ $48B, Mistral @ $24B, AMD buys World Labs for $8.2B
Oct to date:
- AIE NYC
- @dhh stops using Rails
- ArtCraft clones Adobe suite
- Interpretability vs Polysemanticity
- OpenAI Quasi-Riemann-Hypothesis & 722 Math
- Notable Models: Reflection Beam, Claude Haiku 5.5, Muse Wonder & Wonder Full reach Opus 5.5 tier
- Big Raises: TypeSafe $7.5B 3 weeks after launch, Modal @ $16B
(this was done for research purposes for the http://aie.codes keynote in Nov, just sharing notes in case helpfuil)