Machine Learning Research
Computer Use Gains Momentum: OpenAI’s Operator automates online tasks with a new AI agent
OpenAI introduced an AI agent that performs simple web tasks on a user’s behalf.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Machine Learning Research
Reinforcement Learning Heats Up: How DeepSeek-R1 and Kimi k1.5 use reinforcement learning to improve reasoning
Reinforcement learning is emerging as an avenue for building large language models with advanced reasoning capabilities.
Data Points
Kimi’s k1.5 is o1’s newest competitor; Learn how it was trained: Atlas, a Mayo Clinic model to detect cancer and other diseases
Claude’s Citations API makes it easier to track your sources. Browser Use challenges Computer Use, for free. How game developers both adopt and fear AI. Hunyuan’s new open model builds 3D assets with textures.
Data Points
OpenAI’s Operator brings agents to the browser: U.S. reverses course on AI regulation
ByteDance’s Doubao promises GPT-4o performance at cut-rate prices. Perplexity debuts new API grounding in web search. Hugging Face’s SmolVLM gets even smaller. Benchmark-maker Epoch AI and OpenAI criticized for keeping funding deal under wraps.
Letters
How to Cool a Warming Planet: The only plausible path to keeping climate change in check is geoengineering.
Greetings from Davos, Switzerland! Many business and government leaders are gathered here again for the annual World Economic Forum to discuss tech, climate, geopolitics, and economic growth.
The Batch Newsletter
DeepSeek’s Open Reasoning Model, Affordable Humanoid Robots, Texas’ Restrictive AI Law, GenAI for Electronics
The Batch AI News and Insights: Greetings from Davos, Switzerland! Many business and government leaders are gathered here again for the annual World Economic Forum to discuss tech, climate, geopolitics, and economic growth.
Machine Learning Research
Generated Chip Designs Work in Mysterious Ways: Researchers used deep learning and an evolutionary algorithm to design chips in minutes
Designing integrated circuits typically requires years of human expertise. Recent work set AI to the task with surprising results.
Tech & Society
Texas Moves to Regulate AI: Texas introduces landmark bill to regulate AI development and use
Lawmakers in the U.S. state of Texas are considering stringent AI regulation.
Hardware
Humanoid Robot Price Break: Unitree and EngineAI showcase affordable humanoid robots
Chinese robot makers Unitree and EngineAI showed off relatively low-priced humanoid robots that could bring advanced robotics closer to everyday applications.
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.
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.