Weekly AI news for engineers, executives, and enthusiasts.

OpenAI looks inside neural networks: Baidu’s multimodal ERNIE 5.0 arrives, priced to compete

VibeThinker-1.5B, a small but powerful reasoning model. Toymakers’ recall of AI dolls that tell kids how to start fires. Qwen3-Max’s discounts and the latest AI price war. SIMA 2, Google’s self-learning game-playing model.

Generating persistent, editable 3D worlds: Exploring the limits of small synthetic datasets

OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, a more personalizable agentic model. Project FETCH’s use of Claude to program robots. Baidu’s new VL model that tops Gemini Pro and GPT-5. OpenAI liable for copyrighted song lyrics.

Don't Believe The Hype!: AGI is not just around the corner. People who enter AI today have huge opportunities to contribute to the field.

I recently received an email titled “An 18-year-old’s dilemma: Too late to contribute to AI?” Its author, who gave me permission to share this, is preparing for college.

Safer (and Sexier) Chatbots, Better Images Through Reasoning, The Dawn of Industrial AI, Forecasting Time Series

The Batch AI News and Insights: I recently received an email titled “An 18-year-old’s dilemma: Too late to contribute to AI?” Its author, who gave me permission to share this, is preparing for college.

Forecasting Multiple Time Series: Amazon’s Chronos-2 sorts out tangled variables to make better predictions

Transformers are well suited to predicting future values of time series like energy prices, wages, or weather, but often — as in those examples — multiple time series often influence one another. Researchers built a model that can forecast multiple time series simultaneously.

The Year AI Went Industrial: The State of AI Report 2025 says AI’s barriers aren’t technological but social and material

A year-in-review report heralds the dawn of AI’s industrial era.

Better Images Through Reasoning: HunyuanImage-3.0 uses reinforcement learning and thinking tokens to better understand prompts

A new image generator reasons over prompts to produce outstanding pictures.

Toward Safer (and Sexier) Chatbots: Inside Character AI and OpenAI’s policy changes to protect younger and vulnerable Users

Chatbot providers, facing criticism for engaging troubled users in conversations that deepen their distress, are updating their services to provide wholesome interactions to younger users while allowing adults to pursue erotic conversations.

Meta AI now recognizes 1600 languages: Amazon and Perplexity spar over browser agents

Kimi K2 Thinking, the new top open model. Deep Research’s expansion to personal documents. Terminal-Bench makers’ new agentic benchmark. TSMC’s slowing revenue growth.

Training power laws translate to robotics: Amazon builds forecasting model to predict multiple scenarios

Stability AI’s limited wins in Getty copyright suit. Kosmos’s new generalist scientific research agent. German Commons, a big open dataset for training AI models. Google’s experiments putting satellites with AI chips in space.

Tear Down Data Silos!: Many software-as-a-service vendors aim to hold their customers' data in silos. Their customers would do well to open the silos so AI agents can use the data.

AI agents are getting better at looking at different types of data in businesses to spot patterns and create value. This is making data silos increasingly painful.

OpenAI Reorgs For Profit, MiniMax-M2 Leads Open Coding, Universal Music Group Embraces AI, LLMs Go Private

The Batch AI News and Insights: AI agents are getting better at looking at different types of data in businesses to spot patterns and create value. This is making data silos increasingly painful.