OpenAI announces the acquisition of Global Illumination, its first ever acquisition. The team had worked on the MMO Biomes; the acquisition signals product expansion.

Anthropic releases Claude 2.1 with a 200K token context window. Long-context LLMs unlock entire-document-at-once reasoning. Legal and research workflows change overnight.

Tesla reveals Optimus Gen 2, a humanoid robot with significantly better balance and manipulation. Humanoid robotics becomes the defining hardware story of the mid-2020s.