Hardware
High Gear for Llama 3.1 405B: SambaNova boosts Llama 3.1 performance with fast, free access to largest model
SambaNova raised the speed limit for access to the largest model in the Llama 3.1 family — and it’s free.
Generative AI
Machine Learning Research
OpenAI Forges Chains of Thought: OpenAI’s o1 models excel in reasoning, outperform GPT-4o in math and coding
Preliminary versions of OpenAI’s new model family were trained explicitly to think step-by-step, yielding outstanding marks in math, science, and coding — but users can’t see their reasoning steps.
Machine Learning Research
2D-to-3D Goes Mainstream: AI systems from Stability AI and Shutterstock transform 2D images into 3D meshes in seconds
Traditionally, building 3D meshes for gaming, animation, product design, architecture, and the like has been labor-intensive. Now the ability to generate 3D meshes from a single image is widely available.
Machine Learning Research
Making LLMs Explainable: Google’s Gemma Scope probes how large language models think
Researchers have probed the inner workings of individual layers of large language models. A new tool applies this approach to all layers.
Machine Learning Research
Long Context Gets Up to Speed: AI21 Labs’ Jamba 1.5 outpaces transformers in long-text processing
A new model generates tokens faster than current transformers, especially when processing long inputs.
Generative AI
Agentic Coding Strides Forward: Genie coding assistant outperforms competitors on SWE-bench by over 30 percent
An agentic coding assistant boosted the state of the art in an important benchmark by more than 30 percent.
Machine Learning Research
Scaling Laws for Data Quality: Scaling laws reveal the impact of data quality in vision-language model training
When training vision-language models, developers often remove lower-quality examples from the training set. But keeping only the highest-quality examples may not be ideal, researchers found.
Generative AI
Open Models for Math and Audio: Alibaba advances open-weight LLMs with Qwen2 Math and Audio variants
Alibaba followed up its open-weights Qwen2 large language models with specialized variations.
Generative AI
Google Imagen 3 Raises the Bar: Google’s Imagen 3 outperforms rivals in text-to-image benchmarks
Image generation continued its rapid march forward with a new version of Google’s flagship text-to-image model.
Generative AI
AI Agents for AI Research: Agentic workflow generates novel scientific research papers
While some observers argue that large language models can’t produce truly original output, new work prompted them to generate novel scientific research.
Machine Learning Research
Machine Translation Goes Agentic: TransAgents, a system that boosts literary translation with a multi-agent workflow
Literary works are challenging to translate. Their relative length, cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions...
Business
AI Leadership Makes for a Difficult Balance Sheet: OpenAI faces financial growing pains, spending double its revenue
OpenAI may be spending roughly twice as much money as it’s bringing in, a sign of the financial pressures of blazing the trail in commercial applications of AI.