Tech & Society
Amazon’s Next-Gen Voice Assistant: Alexa+ adds generative AI and agents, using Claude and other models
Amazon announced Alexa+, a major upgrade to its long-running voice assistant.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Machine Learning Research
Budget for Reasoning to the Token: Claude 3.7 Sonnet adds extended thinking mode
Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet implements a hybrid reasoning approach that lets users decide how much thinking they want the model to do before it renders a response.
Machine Learning Research
OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 Goes Big: OpenAI releases GPT-4.5, its most powerful non-reasoning model and maybe its last
OpenAI launched GPT-4.5, which may be its last non-reasoning model.
Machine Learning Research
Text Generation by Diffusion: Mercury Coder uses diffusion to generate text
Typical large language models are autoregressive, predicting the next token, one at a time, from left to right. A new model hones all text tokens at once.
Data Points
All the models we’ve been waiting for: OpenAI’s scaled-up Project Orion arrives
Mercury debuts diffusion language models. Alibaba’s top video model is now free to download. A new model from Tencent is built for speed. IBM’s Granite 3.2 models are built for business.
Letters
What I’ve Learned Building Voice Applications: Best practices for building apps based on AI’s evolving voice-in, voice-out stack
The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications.
The Batch Newsletter
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.
Machine Learning Research
Reasoning in Vectors, Not Text: Meta introduces Chain of Continuous Thought (Coconut) to improve next-token prediction
Although large language models can improve their performance by generating a chain of thought (CoT) — intermediate text tokens that break down the process of responding to a prompt into a series of steps.
Tech & Society
Deepfake Developers Appropriate Celebrity Likenesses: Viral video uses AI to depict celebrities without consent, sparking legal debate
A viral deepfake video showed media superstars who appeared to support a cause — but it was made without their participation or permission.
Business
Big AI Spending Continues to Rise: Tech giants increase capital spending to meet growing infrastructure demands
Top AI companies announced plans to dramatically ramp up their spending on AI infrastructure.
Science
Reading Minds, No Brain Implant Required: Brain2Qwerty, a system that decodes thoughts using brain waves without surgery
To date, efforts to decode what people are thinking from their brain waves often relied on electrodes implanted in the cortex. New work used devices outside the head to pick up brain signals that enabled an AI system, as a subject typed, to accurately guess what they were typing.
Data Points
Anthropic releases Claude 3.7 Sonnet as a hybrid reasoning model: DeepSeek’s FlashMLA is its first entry in OpenInfra week
Figure’s Helix vision language action robotics model. Google fine-tunes its own family of open VL models. SuperGPQA may be the most challenging general knowledge test yet. Meta creates new framework to evaluate agentic LLMs.