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AI Daily Brief — 09 January 2025

Thursday was thinner. xAI rolled out a standalone Grok iOS app worldwide — moving Grok off the X platform and into a dedicated consumer app after a December limited beta. Hippocratic AI raised $141 million Series B at over $1.6 billion. Anthropic’s $60B Lightspeed talks kept reverberating, with Bloomberg framing the round as Lightspeed’s defining AI bet.

Top stories

  • xAI launches a standalone Grok app for iOS worldwide. The dedicated Grok consumer app rolled out globally, moving Musk’s chatbot out of the X platform shell and into its own iPhone home — a small step in product positioning but a meaningful one for distribution. via Wikipedia (Grok)
  • Hippocratic AI raises $141M Series B at $1.6B+ valuation. Healthcare-LLM Hippocratic AI announced a Kleiner Perkins-led Series B with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, and General Catalyst — putting it firmly into the vertical-LLM unicorn club. via Crunchbase
  • Bloomberg frames Anthropic’s $2B round as Lightspeed’s “megadeal.” Continuing Tuesday’s CNBC/TechCrunch reporting, Bloomberg added context on Lightspeed’s strategy: a non-strategic round (Amazon’s $8B and Google’s $2B+10% stake were already on the cap table) that cements Lightspeed’s AI portfolio in one cheque. via Yahoo Finance / Bloomberg

Who shipped

Aside from the Grok iOS rollout, frontier labs were quiet. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta made no dated launches. Sam Altman’s “Reflections” essay from Sunday and Microsoft’s Phi-4 release from Wednesday continued to drive analyst notes.

Open-source pulse

No new releases from DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax, Moonshot, Zhipu, or ByteDance. DeepSeek would ship its consumer iOS / Android app the next day; R1 weights were eleven days away.

Quiet corners

CES 2025 entered its final day; show-floor coverage continued on AI PCs, robotics, and on-device inference, but no new infrastructure announcements landed. arXiv produced no headline LLM paper dated Jan 9 — the Meta-CoT and Agent Laboratory papers from the prior day were still the week’s reference points.

By the numbers

  • $141M — Hippocratic AI Series B size
  • $1.6B+ — Hippocratic AI new valuation
  • Most-mentioned lab: xAI (Grok app)
  • Notable absences: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta (product side)

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 9 January 2025.