What Matters in AI Right Now

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Cartoon of a man playing violin saying “I’m fine-tuning!” while a woman at her desk covers her ears, replying “Did you try prompting?”

Mar 26, 2025

Compact Vision-Language with Open Weights, Faster Learning, Diffusion in Few Steps, LLMs Aid Tutors

The Batch AI News and Insights: Fine-tuning small language models has been gaining traction over the past half year.

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

Bar chart comparing accuracy and percentile scores of DeepSeek models and OpenAI models across benchmarks.

DeepSeek Sharpens Its Reasoning: DeepSeek-R1, an affordable rival to OpenAI’s o1

Two colleagues discuss their chatbot’s success; one suggests hiring an AI Product Manager.

Tumbling Training Costs, Desktop AI Supercomputer, Tighter AI Export Restrictions, Improved Contrastive Loss

AYA Vision architecture diagram showing vision encoder, multimodal merging, and LLM backbone for AI-powered image processing.

Mar 19, 2025

Inside Google’s Co-Scientist, Copyright Office Weighs Generated Works, Multilingual (and Good at All of Them), Diffusion for Materials Design

The Batch AI News and Insights: Last Friday on Pi Day, we held AI Dev 25, a new conference for AI Developers.

Illustration of a programmer at a computer displaying PyTorch code, while a smiling colleague gives a thumbs-up in approval.

Mar 12, 2025

DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored, QwQ-32B Puts Reasoning in Smaller Model, Phi-4-multimodal Takes Spoken Input, Training AI May Not Be Fair Use

The Batch AI News and Insights: Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.

Diagram of an RQ-Transformer speech system with Helium and Depth Transformers for audio processing.

Mar 05, 2025

GPT-4.5 Goes Big, Claude 3.7 Reasons, Alexa+ Goes Agentic, Generating Text Like an Image

The Batch AI News and Insights: Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.

Diagram comparing direct audio generation with a foundation model vs. a voice pipeline using STT, LLM, and TTS.

Feb 26, 2025

Meta Reads Minds, Big AI Spending Climbs, Deepfakes Appropriate Celeb Likenesses, Reasoning in Vectors

The Batch AI News and Insights: The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications.

Thermal aerial image showing a suspect surrendering with hands raised. A marker highlights their location.

Feb 19, 2025

Grok 3 Scales Up, Mobile Apps Generated To Order, Musk Moves On OpenAI, Officials Reverse Course on AI Regulation

The Batch AI News and Insights: Last month, a drone from Skyfire AI was credited with saving a police officer’s life after a dramatic 2 a.m. traffic stop.

“Responsible AI” written on a wall, with “Safety” crossed out in blue paint.

Feb 12, 2025

OpenAI Does Deep Research, Google Goes to War, Alibaba Answers DeepSeek, Web Agents Do Tree Search

The Batch AI News and Insights: At the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris this week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said, “I’m not here to talk about AI safety.

Comic-style illustration of a confident woman and man standing beside bold ‘10X’ text on a bright background.

Feb 05, 2025

o3-mini Puts Reasoning in High Gear, How to Train for Computer Use, Gemini 2.0 Thinks Faster, More-Responsive Voice Interactions

The Batch AI News and Insights: A “10x engineer” — a widely accepted concept in tech — purportedly has 10 times the impact of the average engineer.

Jan 29, 2025

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

The Batch AI News and Insights: The buzz over DeepSeek this week crystallized, for many people, a few important trends that have been happening in plain sight.

Global temperature change map and graph comparing scenarios with and without SAI intervention.

Jan 22, 2025

DeepSeek’s Open Reasoning Model, Affordable Humanoid Robots, Texas’ Restrictive AI Law, GenAI for Electronics

The Batch AI News and Insights: Greetings from Davos, Switzerland! Many business and government leaders are gathered here again for the annual World Economic Forum to discuss tech, climate, geopolitics, and economic growth.

Jan 15, 2025

Tumbling Training Costs, Desktop AI Supercomputer, Tighter AI Export Restrictions, Improved Contrastive Loss

The Batch AI News and Insights: Writing software, especially prototypes, is becoming cheaper. This will lead to increased demand for people who can decide what to build. AI Product Management has a bright future!

Illustration of tech tools like OpenAI, MongoDB, Heroku, and Python with Andrew Ng working on a laptop

Jan 08, 2025

When Good Models Do Bad Things, What Users Really Want, More Training Data!, Better Model Merging

The Batch AI News and Insights: Using AI-assisted coding to build software prototypes is an important way to quickly explore many ideas and invent new things.

Andrew Ng celebrating and wishing a Happy New Year 2025 with sparklers.

Jan 01, 2025

Happy New Year! Hopes For 2025 With Mustafa Suleyman, Audrey Tang, Albert Gu, Hanno Basse, Joseph Gonzalez, David Ding

The Batch AI News and Insights: Despite having worked on AI since I was a teenager, I’m now more excited than ever about what we can do with it, especially in building AI applications.

Deer training class with sleigh diagrams on a chalkboard.

Dec 25, 2024

Phi-4 Breaks Size Barrier, HunyuanVideo Narrows Open Source Gap, Gemini 2.0 Flash Accelerates Multimodal Modeling, LLMs Propose Research Ideas

The Batch AI News and Insights: I’m thrilled that former students and postdocs of mine won both of this year’s NeurIPS Test of Time Paper Awards.

Cartoon showing people stuck in wet concrete, with a person saying ‘You asked for a concrete idea!’

Dec 11, 2024

Amazon Nova’s Competitive Price/Performance, OpenAI o1 Pro’s High Price/Performance, Google’s Game Worlds on Tap, Factual LLMs

The Batch AI News and Insights: AI Product Management is evolving rapidly. The growth of generative AI and AI-based developer tools has created numerous opportunities to build AI applications.

What Matters in AI Right Now

Compact Vision-Language with Open Weights, Faster Learning, Diffusion in Few Steps, LLMs Aid Tutors

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

DeepSeek Sharpens Its Reasoning: DeepSeek-R1, an affordable rival to OpenAI’s o1

Tumbling Training Costs, Desktop AI Supercomputer, Tighter AI Export Restrictions, Improved Contrastive Loss

Inside Google’s Co-Scientist, Copyright Office Weighs Generated Works, Multilingual (and Good at All of Them), Diffusion for Materials Design

DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored, QwQ-32B Puts Reasoning in Smaller Model, Phi-4-multimodal Takes Spoken Input, Training AI May Not Be Fair Use

GPT-4.5 Goes Big, Claude 3.7 Reasons, Alexa+ Goes Agentic, Generating Text Like an Image

Meta Reads Minds, Big AI Spending Climbs, Deepfakes Appropriate Celeb Likenesses, Reasoning in Vectors

Grok 3 Scales Up, Mobile Apps Generated To Order, Musk Moves On OpenAI, Officials Reverse Course on AI Regulation

OpenAI Does Deep Research, Google Goes to War, Alibaba Answers DeepSeek, Web Agents Do Tree Search

o3-mini Puts Reasoning in High Gear, How to Train for Computer Use, Gemini 2.0 Thinks Faster, More-Responsive Voice Interactions

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

DeepSeek’s Open Reasoning Model, Affordable Humanoid Robots, Texas’ Restrictive AI Law, GenAI for Electronics

Tumbling Training Costs, Desktop AI Supercomputer, Tighter AI Export Restrictions, Improved Contrastive Loss

When Good Models Do Bad Things, What Users Really Want, More Training Data!, Better Model Merging

Happy New Year! Hopes For 2025 With Mustafa Suleyman, Audrey Tang, Albert Gu, Hanno Basse, Joseph Gonzalez, David Ding

Top AI Stories of 2024! Agents Rise, Prices Fall, Models Shrink, Video Takes Off, Acquisitions Morph

Phi-4 Breaks Size Barrier, HunyuanVideo Narrows Open Source Gap, Gemini 2.0 Flash Accelerates Multimodal Modeling, LLMs Propose Research Ideas

Amazon Nova’s Competitive Price/Performance, OpenAI o1 Pro’s High Price/Performance, Google’s Game Worlds on Tap, Factual LLMs

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