Letters
The Impact of U.S. Tariffs on AI: Broad tariffs will create challenges for AI and beyond, but I see a few silver linings. Here’s what’s in store.
I am so sorry that the U.S. is letting down our friends and allies.
Apr 09, 2025
The Batch Newsletter
Inside the Mind of Claude, Llama 4’s Mixture of Vision-Language Experts, More Open Multimodal Models, Neural Net for Tabular Data
The Batch AI News and Insights: I am so sorry that the U.S. is letting down our friends and allies.
Machine Learning Research
Better Than Trees for Tabular Data: Transformers can outperform decision trees at predicting unlabeled spreadsheet cells
If you have a collection of variables that represent, say, a cancer patient and you want to classify the patient’s illness as likely cancer or not, algorithms based on decision trees, such as gradient-boosted trees, typically perform better than neural networks.
Machine Learning Research
Better Multimodal Performance With Open Weights: Qwen2.5-Omni 7B raises the bar for small multimodal models
Alibaba’s latest open-weights system raises the bar for multimodal tasks in a relatively small model.
Machine Learning Research
Llama’s Mixture of Vision-Language Experts: Meta releases Llama 4 models, claims edge over AI competitors
Meta updated its popular open-weights models, claiming performance superior to closed competitors in three size classes.
Machine Learning Research
Ordinary LLMs Implicitly Take Reasoning Steps: Anthropic experiment finds Claude shows signs of unprompted reasoning
Even without explicit training in reasoning, large language models “think” in ways that may be more deliberate than previously understood.