The Batch Newsletter
AI Giants Go Nuclear, A Tech Bromance Turns Turbulent, Mistral Sharpens the Edge, Cheaper Video Generation
The Batch AI News and Insights: Startups live or die by their ability to execute at speed.
Latest
Machine Learning Research
Faster, Cheaper Video Generation: Pyramidal Flow Matching, a cost-cutting method for training video generators
Researchers devised a way to cut the cost of training video generators. They used it to build a competitive open source text-to-video model and promised to release the training code.
Machine Learning Research
Mistral AI Sharpens the Edge: Mistral AI unveils Ministral 3B and 8B models, outperforming rivals in small-scale AI
Mistral AI launched two models that raise the bar for language models with 8 billion or fewer parameters, small enough to run on many edge devices.
Business
AI Bromance Turns Turbulent: Microsoft and OpenAI partnership faces strain as both seek less dependence
Once hailed by OpenAI chief Sam Altman as the “best bromance in tech,” the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI is facing challenges as both companies seek greater independence.
Tech & Society
AI Giants Go Nuclear: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft bet on nuclear power to meet AI energy demands
Major AI companies plan to meet the growing demand with nuclear energy.
Data Points
DeepSeek’s Janus reads and generates images: SambaNova and Gradio team up for fast AI webapps
A new safety investigation of Tesla’s self-driving tech. Perplexity adds collaborative spaces and internal search. Nvidia’s new Nemotron model scores big on benchmarks. Telegram’s subculture of explicit deepfake generators.
Data Points
Mistral’s Ministral family tops other local models: Open AI’s Swarm orchestrates teams of agents
NotebookLM lets you add prompts for better podcasts. Apple researchers doubt whether current LLMs can reason. OpenAI tests ChatGPT for gender and racial bias. Perplexity squares off with The New York Times.
Letters
To Fight Climate Change, It’s Time to Consider Geoengineering: Hurricanes Helene and Milton took hundreds of lives, not to mention other disasters driven by climate change. Stratospheric aerosol injection could save countless lives.
To Fight Climate Change, It's Time to Consider Geoengineering
The Batch Newsletter
Bogus Apps, AI Boomtown, Better Embeddings, 2024 Highlights
The Batch AI News and Insights: It’s high time to take geoengineering more seriously as a potential tool to mitigate climate change.
Machine Learning Research
Better Text Embeddings: Jina AI launches jina-embeddings-v3, a text embedding model with task-specific adapters
Text embedding models are often used to retrieve text, cluster text, determine similarity between texts, and generate initial embeddings for text classifiers. A new embedding model comes with adapters that specialize it to each of these use cases.
Tech & Society
A Year of Contending Forces: State of AI report highlights 2024’s major trends and breakthroughs
A new report documents the interplay of powerful forces that drove AI over the past year: open versus proprietary technology, public versus private financing, innovation versus caution.
Business
U.S. Cracks Down on AI Apps That Overpromise, Underdeliver: U.S. Federal Trade Commission launches Operation AI Comply to tackle deceptive business practices
The United States government launched Operation AI Comply, targeting businesses whose uses of AI allegedly misled customers.