2025 digest of digests

Throughout the year we've reported on some of the larger stories, and some of the lesser-covered happenings, in our regular monthly digests. We look back through the archives and pick out one or two stories from each of our digests. This month, AI startup DeepSeek released DeepSeek R1, a reasoning model designed for good performance on logic, maths, and pattern-finding tasks. The company has also launched six smaller versions of R1 that are tiny enough to run locally on laptops. In Wired, Zeyi Yang reported on who is behind the startup, whilst Tongliang Liu (in The Conversation) looked at how DeepSeek achieved its results with a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors.