Business
Apple’s Foundation Models Will Be Gemini: Apple announced a partnership with Google to power Siri and other AI features
Apple cut a multi-year deal with Google to use Gemini models as the basis of AI models that reside on Apple devices.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Machine Learning Research
Retrieval Faces Hard Limits: Google and Johns Hopkins researchers show embedding models can’t search unlimited documents
Can your retriever find all the relevant documents for any query your users might enter? Maybe not, research shows.
Machine Learning Research
Better Spatial Perception for Robots: MolmoAct creates spatial maps for robots to plot their actions before executing text directions
Robot control systems that accept only text input struggle to translate words into motions in space. Researchers developed a system that enables robots to plan spatial paths before they execute text instructions.
Machine Learning Research
What ChatGPT Users Want: ChatGPT users now more likely to be young, female, and seeking info, study shows
What do ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly active users do with it? OpenAI teamed up with a Harvard economist to find out.
Business
Inside Walmart’s AI App Factory: Walmart’s Element platform for industrial-scale AI app development — a progress report
The world’s biggest retailer by revenue revealed new details about its cloud- and model-agnostic AI application development platform.
Machine Learning Research
Equally Fluent in Many Languages: Cohere’s Aya Vision beats multilingual rivals in text & image understanding
Multilingual AI models often suffer uneven performance across languages, especially in multimodal tasks. A pair of lean models counters this trend with consistent understanding of text and images across major languages.
Tech & Society
Amazon’s Next-Gen Voice Assistant: Alexa+ adds generative AI and agents, using Claude and other models
Amazon announced Alexa+, a major upgrade to its long-running voice assistant.
Science
Reading Minds, No Brain Implant Required: Brain2Qwerty, a system that decodes thoughts using brain waves without surgery
To date, efforts to decode what people are thinking from their brain waves often relied on electrodes implanted in the cortex. New work used devices outside the head to pick up brain signals that enabled an AI system, as a subject typed, to accurately guess what they were typing.
Machine Learning Research
Tree Search for Web Agents: How tree search improves AI agents’ ability to browse the web and complete tasks
Browsing the web to achieve a specific goal can be challenging for agents based on large language models and even for vision-language models that can process onscreen images of a browser.
Machine Learning Research
Fine-Tuning Fine Points: Active inheritance, a smarter way to fine-tune models on synthetic data
The practice of fine-tuning models on synthetic data is becoming well established. But synthetic training data, even if it represents the training task well, may include characteristics like toxicity that impart unwelcome properties in the trained model’s output...