Business
Meta Befriends Scale AI: Meta invests $14.3 billion in Scale AI, hires CEO Alexandr Wang
Meta hired the leadership of ScaleAI and put billions into the data-labeling startup to accelerate its AI efforts.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Data Points
MiniMax M1 tackles Qwen3, DeepSeek-R1, Claude 4 Opus, and more: Gemini 2.5 models get price changes and a new partner
Cursor introduces a new-high end subscription. Harvard makes its public-domain books data set widely available. Essential AI introduces its own auto-labeled data set. MIT builds an LLM that can fine-tune itself.
Machine Learning Research
Apple Sharpens Its GenAI Profile: Apple updates its on-device and cloud AI models, introduces a new developer API
Apple revamped two vision-language models in a bid to catch up with fast-moving competitors.
Machine Learning Research
LLM Rights Historical Wrongs: Stanford and Princeton researchers fine-tune a language model to identify racial discrimination in property
In Northern California, old property deeds may still include racial clauses: language, made illegal decades ago, that was designed to ban people of color from owning or living in certain homes.
Machine Learning Research
More Reasoning for Harder Problems: OpenAI debuts o3-pro, an updated reasoning model that applies more tokens at inference
OpenAI launched o3-pro, a more capable version of its most advanced reasoning vision-language model.
Business
Hollywood Joins AI Copyright Fight: Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, alleging the image generator violates their intellectual property rights
Hollywood studios joined the record companies, publishers, and artists in the fight against companies that have trained AI models on their copyrighted works.
Letters
High-Skilled Immigration and International Students Are Good For the U.S. — And the World: Making H1-B and F-1 visas more difficult to get harms U.S. competitiveness in AI and innovation worldwide.
One of the most effective things the U.S. or any other nation can do to ensure its competitiveness in AI is to welcome high-skilled immigration and international students who have the potential to become high-skilled.
The Batch Newsletter
Apple Sharpens Its GenAI Profile, Hollywood Joins Copyright Fight, OpenAI Ups Reasoning Quotient, LLM Rights Historical Wrongs
The Batch AI News and Insights: One of the most effective things the U.S. or any other nation can do to ensure its competitiveness in AI is to welcome high-skilled immigration and international students who have the potential to become high-skilled.
Data Points
Predicting cyclones using neural networks: o3-pro trades speed for accuracy in code, science
Video game performers’ new AI deal. Meta’s new robotics world model. Mistral’s multilingual reasoning models. An open-source template for research agents.
Machine Learning Research
Better Video, Fewer Tokens: STORM Processes Fewer Tokens And Still Beats GPT-4o On Video Understanding Benchmarks
Researchers reduced the number of tokens needed to represent video frames to be fed to a transformer.
Business
AI Market Trends in Charts and Graphs: Venture Capitalist Mary Meeker Revives Her Trend Reports With a Deep Dive Into the AI Boom
Renowned investment analyst Mary Meeker is back with a report on the AI market, six years after publishing her last survey of the internet.
Machine Learning Research
More Consistent Characters and Styles: Black Forest Labs Launches FLUX.1 Kontext for Generating and Alterating Images with Consistent Details
Same character, new background, new action. That’s the focus of the latest text-to-image models from Germany’s Black Forest Labs.