Letters
Learn the Language of Software: AI won’t kill programming. There has never been a better time to start coding.
Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.
Latest
The Batch Newsletter
DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored, QwQ-32B Puts Reasoning in Smaller Model, Phi-4-multimodal Takes Spoken Input, Training AI May Not Be Fair Use
The Batch AI News and Insights: Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.
Tech & Society
DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored: Perplexity launches uncensored version of DeepSeek-R1
Large language models built by developers in China may, in some applications, be less useful outside that country because they avoid topics its government deems politically sensitive. A developer fine-tuned DeepSeek-R1 to widen its scope without degrading its overall performance.
Tech & Society
Judge Upholds Copyright in AI Training Case: U.S. court rejects fair use defense in Thomson Reuters AI lawsuit
A United States court delivered a major ruling that begins to answer the question whether, and under what conditions, training an AI system on copyrighted material is considered fair use that doesn’t require permission.
Machine Learning Research
Microsoft Tackles Voice-In, Text-Out: Microsoft’s Phi-4 Multimodal model can process text, images, and speech simultaneously
Microsoft debuted its first official large language model that responds to spoken input.
Machine Learning Research
Compact Reasoning: QwQ-32B challenges DeepSeek-R1 and other larger reasoning models
Most models that have learned to reason via reinforcement learning were huge models. A much smaller model now competes with them.
Data Points
EAGLE-3 speeds up language models: And the 2024 Turing Award goes to…
Music and lyrics in one diffusion model. Manus AI’s impressive demos spark excitement and backlash. OpenAI sees AGI as a gradual evolution. Google unveils its first Gemini-branded embedding models.
Data Points
Qwen’s mid-sized reasoning model scores big: Sesame moves through speech models’ “uncanny valley”
Cohere’s open vision models support many languages. Jamba 1.6’s two hybrid MoE models promise more speed. Anthropic overhauls its developer console for Claude Sonnet 3.7. Mistral brings its multilingual/multimedia skills to OCR.
Letters
Wait Your Turn! Conversation by Voice Versus Text: Text interactions require taking turns, but voices may interrupt or overlap. Here’s how AI is evolving for voice interactions.
Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.
The Batch Newsletter
GPT-4.5 Goes Big, Claude 3.7 Reasons, Alexa+ Goes Agentic, Generating Text Like an Image
The Batch AI News and Insights: Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.
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.
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.