Data Points | The Batch

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Data Points

OpenAI’s Operator brings agents to the browser: U.S. reverses course on AI regulation

ByteDance’s Doubao promises GPT-4o performance at cut-rate prices. Perplexity debuts new API grounding in web search. Hugging Face’s SmolVLM gets even smaller. Benchmark-maker Epoch AI and OpenAI criticized for keeping funding deal under wraps.

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Data Points

DeepSeek releases R1, R1-Zero, and six smaller distilled models: Luma updates Dream Machine’s video engine

Codestral matches or beats mid-sized fill-in-the-middle models. MiniMax’s “Lightning Attention” tries to improve on the transformer. Co-STORM now available for AI collaboration on encyclopedia articles. LlamaIndex uses agentic RAG to retrieve info from complex documents.

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Data Points

Training a reasoning model for less than $450: OpenAI adds agent-ish tools to ChatGPT

Moondream’s lightweight vision model adds gaze detection. Fine-tuning Flux Pro’s generative model with just a few images. Copilot Chat brings simple agents to Microsoft 365. Google adds Gemini to all its Workspace plans.

Data Points

Report claims AI will create millions of net jobs: rStar-Math boosts small models’ math skills to o1’s level

Court filings show Meta pirated model training data. Stability’s SPAR3D speeds up 3D image generation. How robots aid nursing care workers in Japan. Deliberative alignment uses more compute to ensure safety.

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Data Points

Nvidia announces Cosmos world models at CES: Microsoft’s Phi-4 model now available on Hugging Face

AI careers remain just as hot as you might expect. Columbia’s GET model predicts gene expression. Cohere’s North brings easy and secure automaton to enterprise. Meta pauses older AI characters but will introduce new ones this year.

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Data Points

ElevenLabs drops latency to 75 milliseconds: New Falcon3 helps push the field for smaller language models

Nvidia promises to open source Run:ai. SALT inverts distillation by having a smaller model train a larger one. SWE-Gym offers new way to fine-tune coding agents. Llama put to work to recommend books on Scribd.

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Data Points

Texas legislation would aggressively regulate AI: OpenAI revisits a public benefit for-profit structure

SmallThinker builds a 3 billion parameter reasoning model. Alibaba cuts prices on its Qwen models. Google unveils the FACTS model benchmark. Smolagents orchestrates smaller open source agents.

A press conference with the AI at the podium, surrounded by reporters, cameras, and microphones.

Data Points

New Year’s resolutions for (and by) AI in 2025: A special New Year’s Eve issue of Data Points

Want a sneak peek at AI’s resolutions for 2025? We’ve got you covered: Get less expensive. Hallucinate less often. Perform better at math. Clean up after myself. Use less energy. Save as many lives as I can.

A diverse team of AI researchers gathers around a workstation to work on a robotics model

Data Points

DeepSeek-V3 is the new best open model: All about OpenAI’s upcoming o-series models

Genesis uses generative AI in a physics-based robotics/world platform. Qwen presents QVQ, an open language/vision model. ModernBERT updates BERT as a classic classifier/retrieval workhorse. CodeLLM switches between models depending on your language and query.

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Data Points

The AI tools that helped define 2024: A special winter holiday issue of Data Points

The Big Guys (Google, Anthropic, Perplexity). Making Media (Black Forest Labs, Udio). Building Software (OpenHands, Cursor, LangChain, Meta). Bringing It All Together (Replit, UX Pilot, and one more).

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Data Points

Google adds Thinking Mode to Flash 2.0: OpenAI’s o1 now available in the API

Speech-to-speech models fall short on benchmarks. Backlash against misleading news summaries. Google updates its video and image models. Nvidia’s $250 palm-sized computer for AI developers.

A futuristic scene of humanoid robots testing AI systems in a lab with data charts and coding screens.

Data Points

Microsoft’s Phi-4 proves AI power isn’t just about size: Projects and Canvas get ChatGPT ready for work

NotebookLM gets a plus-sized update. Meta’s Motivo model marks a return to the metaverse. New synthetic data generator makes training easier. NeurIPS 2024’s sabotage controversy.