Business
Prices Tumble: AI price wars drive costs down as competition heats up
Fierce competition among model makers and cloud providers drove down the price of access to state-of-the-art models.
Latest
Machine Learning Research
Agents Ascendant: LLMs evolve with agentic workflows, enabling autonomous reasoning and collaboration
The AI community laid the foundation for systems that can act by prompting large language models iteratively, leading to much higher performance across a range of applications.
Data Points
The AI tools that helped define 2024: A special winter holiday issue of Data Points
The Big Guys (Google, Anthropic, Perplexity). Making Media (Black Forest Labs, Udio). Building Software (OpenHands, Cursor, LangChain, Meta). Bringing It All Together (Replit, UX Pilot, and one more).
Data Points
Google adds Thinking Mode to Flash 2.0: OpenAI’s o1 now available in the API
Speech-to-speech models fall short on benchmarks. Backlash against misleading news summaries. Google updates its video and image models. Nvidia’s $250 palm-sized computer for AI developers.
Letters
Focus on the Future, Learn From the Past: 15 years ago, the idea of scaling up deep learning was controversial — but it was right. Keep your eyes open for such ideas in 2025.
I’m thrilled that former students and postdocs of mine won both of this year’s NeurIPS Test of Time Paper Awards.
The Batch Newsletter
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.
Machine Learning Research
When LLMs Propose Research Ideas: Stanford study finds AI matches human experts at writing research proposals
How do agents based on large language models compare to human experts when it comes to proposing machine learning research? Pretty well, according to one study.
Machine Learning Research
Multimodal Modeling on the Double: Google introduces Gemini 2.0 Flash, a faster, more capable AI model
Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, the first member of its updated Gemini family of large multimodal models, combines speed with performance that exceeds that of its earlier flagship model, Gemini 1.5 Pro, on several measures.
Machine Learning Research
Open Video Gen Closes the Gap: Tencent releases HunyuanVideo, an open source model rivaling commercial video generators
The gap is narrowing between closed and open models for video generation.
Machine Learning Research
Phi-4 Beats Models Five Times Its Size: Microsoft’s Phi-4 blends synthetic and organic data to surpass larger models in math and reasoning benchmarks
Microsoft updated its smallest model family with a single, surprisingly high-performance model.
Data Points
Microsoft’s Phi-4 proves AI power isn’t just about size: Projects and Canvas get ChatGPT ready for work
NotebookLM gets a plus-sized update. Meta’s Motivo model marks a return to the metaverse. New synthetic data generator makes training easier. NeurIPS 2024’s sabotage controversy.
Data Points
Harvard University releases giant dataset of public-domain books: Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash beats top models on benchmarks
ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode can see as well as hear. GM drops robotaxi division in favor of AI-assisted driving. Ruliad’s new model offers transparent reasoning in a small package. Large Concept Models move on from token-based AI.