Black Forest Labs and Krea partner on an “opinionated” image model. Aristotle chatbot combines math reasoning with verification. Microsoft adds Copilot Mode to its Edge browser. Energy-Based Transformers offer alternative for unsupervised learning.
There is now a path for China to surpass the U.S. in AI. Even though the U.S. is still ahead, China has tremendous momentum with its vibrant open-weights model ecosystem and aggressive moves in semiconductor design and manufacturing.
The Batch AI News and Insights: There is now a path for China to surpass the U.S. in AI. Even though the U.S. is still ahead, China has tremendous momentum with its vibrant open-weights model ecosystem and aggressive moves in semiconductor design and manufacturing.
People who turn to chatbots for companionship show indications of lower self-reported well-being, researchers found.
Nvidia will resume sales of H20 processors in China.
Less than two weeks after Moonshot’s Kimi K2 bested other open-weights, non-reasoning models in tests related to agentic behavior, Alibaba raised the bar yet again.
President Trump set forth principles of an aggressive national AI policy, and he moved to implement them through an action plan and executive orders.
University presses look to lock in AI licensing deals. Unitree’s new, much less expensive humanoid robot. Nvidia adapts CUDA to work with RISC-V chips. AI can predict ancient Latin inscriptions from fragments.
Google’s new AI tool probes images’ backstories. ChatGPT agent tackles general computer tasks. Amazon buys Bee for another crack at AI wearables. New benchmark measures AI agents’ predictions.
We’re organizing a new event called Buildathon: The Rapid Engineering Competition, to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, August 16, 2025!
The Batch AI News and Insights: We’re organizing a new event called Buildathon: The Rapid Engineering Competition, to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, August 16, 2025!
LLMs can struggle with difficult algorithmic or scientific challenges when asked to solve them in a single attempt. An agentic workflow improved one-shot performance on hard problems both theoretical and practical.
Business
The European Union published guidelines to help builders of AI models to comply with the AI Act, which wasenacted last year.
Machine Learning Research
An agent’s performance depends not only on an effective workflow but also on a large language model that excels at agentic activities. A new open-weights model focuses on those capabilities.
Business
A $3 billion bid by OpenAI to acquire Windsurf, maker of the AI-assisted integrated development environment of the same name, collapsed at the 11th hour, setting off a tumultuous few days of corporate maneuvering.
Data Points
How Google’s experimental text embedding model achieves top performance on a multilingual embedding benchmark. How AWS Bedrock AgentCore provides infrastructure for enterprise-grade AI agents. How Anthropic’s Claude for Financial Services enables AI-driven financial systems.
Letters
The invention of modern writing instruments like the typewriter made writing easier, but they also led to the rise of writer’s block, where deciding what to write became the bottleneck.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch AI News and Insights: The invention of modern writing instruments like the typewriter made writing easier, but they also led to the rise of writer’s block, where deciding what to write became the bottleneck.
Tech & Society
A committee convened by California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed principles intended to balance AI innovation with careful governance. The group sought to rethink AI regulation after Newsom vetoed earlier proposed legislation.
Business
Publicly reported compensation for AI talent has skyrocketed in the wake of Meta’s recent hiring spree.
Machine Learning Research
Researchers addressed weaknesses in existing multi-agent frameworks. Their systems achieved scientific and technical breakthroughs.
Machine Learning Research
xAI updated its Grok vision-language model and published impressive benchmark results. But, like earlier versions, Grok 4 showed questionable behavior right out of the gate.
Data Points
How Tencent Hunyuan-A13B offers advanced features and performance in a limited open-weights release. How Alibaba’s Qwen VLo interprets, generates, and alters images. How Hugging Face’s $299–$449 Reachy Mini extends open robotics. How AI saved $500 million at Microsoft.
Letters
Last week, the United States Congress passed President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” I’m disappointed it didn’t include a proposed moratorium on U.S. state-level AI regulation.