Business
Amazon took on talent and technology from robotics startup Covariant to enhance its warehouse automation, an area critical to its core ecommerce business.
Hardware
SambaNova raised the speed limit for access to the largest model in the Llama 3.1 family — and it’s free.
Machine Learning Research
Preliminary versions of OpenAI’s new model family were trained explicitly to think step-by-step, yielding outstanding marks in math, science, and coding — but users can’t see their reasoning steps.
Data Points
Hugging Face open-sources an LLM evaluation suite, Adobe announces its Firefly Video model, Meta researchers blend image diffusion with text transformers, NotebookLM can now generate synthetic podcasts.
Data Points
Copilot adds fine-tuning for faster code completion, DataGemma uses RAG and RIG for fact-retrieval, Mistral introduces its open multimodal model, results of the latest summit on military AI.
Letters
Over the weekend, my two kids colluded in a hilariously bad attempt to mislead me to look in the wrong place during a game of hide-and-seek.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch AI News and Insights: Over the weekend, my two kids colluded in a hilariously bad attempt to mislead me to look in the wrong place during a game of hide-and-seek.
Machine Learning Research
Traditionally, building 3D meshes for gaming, animation, product design, architecture, and the like has been labor-intensive. Now the ability to generate 3D meshes from a single image is widely available.
Machine Learning Research
Datasets that were scraped from the web tend to be unbalanced, meaning examples of some classes (say, cats) are plentiful while examples of others (say, caterpillars) are scarce.
Tech & Society
The European Union, United Kingdom, United States, and other countries signed a legally binding treaty that regulates artificial intelligence.
Business
Waymo, the autonomous vehicle division of Alphabet, released an analysis of its own safety data. It suggests that the company’s self-driving cars are safer than human drivers on the same roads.
Data Points
NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips impress on hardware tests, fine-tuned versions of Llama 3.1 add reflection, most AI jailbreaks may not amount to much, new architecture extends context windows to 100M tokens.