Machine Learning Research
DeepSeek Sharpens Its Reasoning: DeepSeek-R1, an affordable rival to OpenAI’s o1
A new open model rivals OpenAI’s o1, and it’s free to use or modify.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Data Points
DeepSeek releases R1, R1-Zero, and six smaller distilled models: Luma updates Dream Machine’s video engine
Codestral matches or beats mid-sized fill-in-the-middle models. MiniMax’s “Lightning Attention” tries to improve on the transformer. Co-STORM now available for AI collaboration on encyclopedia articles. LlamaIndex uses agentic RAG to retrieve info from complex documents.
Data Points
Training a reasoning model for less than $450: OpenAI adds agent-ish tools to ChatGPT
Moondream’s lightweight vision model adds gaze detection. Fine-tuning Flux Pro’s generative model with just a few images. Copilot Chat brings simple agents to Microsoft 365. Google adds Gemini to all its Workspace plans.
Letters
AI Product Managers Will Be In-Demand: As the cost of building AI products falls, demand for people who know what to build will rise. Get ready for an explosion in AI Product Management!
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!
The Batch Newsletter
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!
Machine Learning Research
Calibrating Contrast: X-CLR, an approach to contrastive learning for better vision models
Contrastive loss functions make it possible to produce good embeddings without labeled data. A twist on this idea makes even more useful embeddings.
Hardware
AI Supercomputer on Your Desk: Nvidia introduced Project Digits, a $3,000 home supercomputer for AI models
Nvidia’s new desktop computer is built specifically to run large AI models.
Tech & Society
U.S. Moves to Expand AI Export Restrictions: New U.S. rules limit AI tech access worldwide, reshaping global markets
The United States proposed limits on exports of AI technology that would dramatically expand previous restrictions, creating a new international hierarchy for access to advanced chips and models.
Machine Learning Research
DeepSeek Ups the Open Weights Ante: DeepSeek-V3 redefines LLM performance and cost efficiency
A new model from Hangzhou upstart DeepSeek delivers outstanding performance and may change the equation for training costs.
Data Points
Report claims AI will create millions of net jobs: rStar-Math boosts small models’ math skills to o1’s level
Court filings show Meta pirated model training data. Stability’s SPAR3D speeds up 3D image generation. How robots aid nursing care workers in Japan. Deliberative alignment uses more compute to ensure safety.
Data Points
Nvidia announces Cosmos world models at CES: Microsoft’s Phi-4 model now available on Hugging Face
AI careers remain just as hot as you might expect. Columbia’s GET model predicts gene expression. Cohere’s North brings easy and secure automaton to enterprise. Meta pauses older AI characters but will introduce new ones this year.
Letters
My AI-Assisted Software Development Stack: The software development stack is evolving fast. Here are some things to consider as you choose components.
Using AI-assisted coding to build software prototypes is an important way to quickly explore many ideas and invent new things.