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Person: "thom_wolf"
xAI raises $20B Series E at ~$230B valuation
grok-5 claude-code xai nvidia cisco fidelity valor-equity-partners qatar-investment-authority mgx stepstone-group baron-capital-group hugging-face amd ai-infrastructure supercomputing robotics ai-hardware agentic-ai context-management token-optimization local-ai-assistants aakash_gupta fei-fei_li lisa_su clementdelangue thom_wolf saradu omarsar0 yuchenj_uw _catwu cursor_ai
xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, completed a massive $20 billion Series E funding round, valuing it at about $230 billion with investors like Nvidia, Cisco Investments, and others. The funds will support AI infrastructure expansion including Colossus I and II supercomputers and training Grok 5, leveraging data from X's 600 million monthly active users. At CES 2026, the focus was on "AI everywhere" with a strong emphasis on AI-first hardware and integration between NVIDIA and Hugging Face's LeRobot for robotics development. The Reachy Mini robot is gaining traction as a consumer robotics platform. In software, Claude Code is emerging as a popular local/private coding assistant, with new UI features in Claude Desktop and innovations like Cursor's dynamic context reducing token usage by nearly 47% in multi-MCP setups. "The 600 million MAU figure in xAI’s announcement combines X platform users with Grok users. That’s a clever framing choice."
not much happened today
gemini-1.5-pro claude-3 chatgpt langchain meta-ai-fair hugging-face openrouter google-ai microsoft openai anthropic agent-ops observability multi-turn-evaluation reinforcement-learning distributed-training api model-stability user-intent-clustering software-development project-management code-generation hwchase17 ankush_gola11 whinthorn koylanai _lewtun bhutanisanyam1 thom_wolf danielhanchen cline canvrno pashmerepat mustafasuleyman yusuf_i_mehdi jordirib1 fidjissimo bradlightcap mikeyk alexalbert__
LangSmith launched the Insights Agent with multi-turn evaluation for agent ops and observability, improving failure detection and user intent clustering. Meta PyTorch and Hugging Face introduced OpenEnv, a Gymnasium-style API and hub for reproducible agentic environments supporting distributed training. Discussions highlighted the importance of provider fidelity in agent coding, with OpenRouter's exacto filter improving stability. Builder UX updates include Google AI Studio's Annotation mode for Gemini code changes, Microsoft's Copilot Mode enhancements in Edge, and OpenAI's Shared Projects and Company Knowledge features for ChatGPT Business. Claude added project-scoped Memory. In reinforcement learning, Meta's ScaleRL proposes a methodology to predict RL scaling outcomes for LLMs with improved efficiency and stability.