AI Daily Brief — 06 January 2025
Monday delivered the year’s first compute supershow. Jensen Huang opened CES 2025 with NVIDIA’s Blackwell consumer line (RTX 50 series), unveiled the $3,000 Project DIGITS personal AI supercomputer, and dropped Cosmos — an open-licensed family of world foundation models for robotics and self-driving. AMD answered with Strix Halo (Ryzen AI Max), Intel pushed Core Ultra 200V into Copilot+ territory, and NVIDIA stock closed at a record $149.43 ahead of the keynote.
Top stories
- NVIDIA unveils the GeForce RTX 50 series. Jensen Huang’s 6:30pm PT keynote launched the Blackwell-based RTX 5090 ($1,999, 92B transistors, 32GB GDDR7, 3,352 AI TOPS), RTX 5080 ($999, 1,801 AI TOPS), RTX 5070 Ti ($749), and RTX 5070 ($549). The 5090 and 5080 ship January 30. via NVIDIA Newsroom
- NVIDIA introduces Project DIGITS — a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer. Powered by the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, the desktop machine delivers a petaflop of AI compute with 128GB unified memory and 4TB NVMe, and runs up to 200B-parameter LLMs locally — 405B when paired via ConnectX. Ships May 2025. via NVIDIA Newsroom
- NVIDIA launches Cosmos open-licensed world foundation models. A platform of open-weight models that generate physics-aware video from text, image, video, or sensor input — built for robotics, “physical AI,” and autonomous vehicles. Launch adopters include 1X, Agility Robotics, XPENG, Uber, and Waabi; models live on NGC and Hugging Face. via NVIDIA Newsroom
- AMD debuts Ryzen AI Max (“Strix Halo”). The flagship SoC packs up to 16 Zen 5 cores, a 40-CU RDNA 3.5 iGPU, a 50 TOPS-class NPU, and a 256-bit LPDDR5X interface with up to 128GB unified memory — positioned to run 200B-parameter LLMs locally and compete with Apple’s M4 Pro. via TechPowerUp
- Intel expands Core Ultra (Series 2) AI PC lineup. New Core Ultra 200V (first Intel Copilot+ PC chip), 200H/200HX (up to 16 cores plus NPU), 200U mobile, and 12 new Core Ultra 200S desktop SKUs — Intel’s broadest AI-PC SKU sweep to date. via Intel Newsroom
Money, infra & hardware
NVIDIA closed at a record $149.43, up over 3%, ahead of Huang’s keynote — surpassing its prior $148.88 high from November. Microsoft’s Friday $80B FY2025 AI-datacenter capex pledge continued to dominate analyst notes. M&A trackers flagged the start of a $4.1B Paychex / Paycor deal during the week, with AI-driven HR cited as strategic rationale.
Who shipped
On the lab side, NVIDIA‘s Cosmos open-weight models are the headline release. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and xAI stayed quiet on Monday — the focus had shifted entirely to silicon.
Open-source pulse
Chinese labs remained dark. DeepSeek-V3 weights still topped HF download charts; the R1 reveal was fourteen days off. Wiz Research would later disclose that an unauthenticated ClickHouse database belonging to DeepSeek contained logs dating back to January 6 — an exposure discovered and patched later in the month.
Research & papers
The first heavy arXiv Monday of 2025: Soochow / NUS / Ant Group’s “A Survey of Test-Time Compute” framed the System-1-to-System-2 shift that would dominate the year’s reasoning wave; University of Bristol shipped a broad survey of generative AI for the creative industries; Michigan researchers posted zero-shot statistical tests for distinguishing LLM-generated text.
By the numbers
- $1,999 — RTX 5090 launch price
- $3,000 — Project DIGITS launch price; 200B-param LLMs local
- $149.43 — NVIDIA record close, +3% on the day
- Most-mentioned company: NVIDIA
- Notable absences: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI
Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 6 January 2025.