Tech & Society
An unauthorized update by an xAI employee caused the Grok chatbot to introduce South African politics into unrelated conversations, the company said.
Machine Learning Research
OpenAI launched an agentic software-development system.
Data Points
U.S., China spar over Huawei chips. Nvidia makes it easier to build custom data centers. Meta’s Open Molecules project hopes to revolutionize chemistry. New research examines language models’ win rates in games.
Data Points
Windsurf introduces SWE-1 family of coding/engineering models. Stripe adapts transformer architecture for versatile payments model. Alibaba’s top video model gets another boost. U.S. Republicans make an end run around local AI regulations.
Letters
AI’s ability to make tasks not just cheaper, but also faster, is underrated in its importance in creating business value.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch AI News and Insights: AI’s ability to make tasks not just cheaper, but also faster, is underrated in its importance in creating business value.
Machine Learning Research
Improving a large language model’s factual accuracy typically requires making it bigger, which in turn, involves more computation. Researchers devised an architecture that enables models to recall relevant details without significantly increasing the amount of computation required.
Business
The European Union made an abrupt U-turn away from its stringent AI regulations. Meta promptly adjusted to the loosening restrictions.
Machine Learning Research
An open-source code generator performs comparably to the reasoning models DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1 with a much smaller model.
Machine Learning Research
Microsoft published its latest recipe for training reasoning models, substantially expanding what is still a fairly small base of public knowledge.
Data Points
Microsoft joins Google’s Agent2Agent project. Police and governments circumvent face-tracking laws. OpenAI and Microsoft reportedly seek a new deal. Researchers use RL to train coding models starting with zero data.
Data Points
Mistral’s new medium-sized language model. Claude developers gain access to web search. Alibaba uses RL to teach LLMs to search better. OpenAI’s plans to build AI infrastructure worldwide.