AI & Society Articles - The Batch

Black toddler sneakers with white soles on wooden floor, featuring Velcro strap and soft inner lining for comfort.

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.

Architecture of Qwen2.5-Omni showing multimodal processing with vision and audio encoders, thinker, talker, and decoder.

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.

AI-generated faces depicting various human emotions, with labeled emotional states shown in a grid-style layout.

Tech & Society

Chatbot Use Creates Emotional Bonds: ChatGPT may ease loneliness but increase dependence, studies suggest

A pair of papers investigate how increasingly human-like chatbots affect users’ emotions.

Colorful AI-themed labyrinth game interface with multiple characters and neural icons in a futuristic digital design.

Tech & Society

Scraping the Web? Beware the Maze: Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth traps scrapers with decoy pages

Bots that scrape websites for AI training data often ignore do-not-crawl requests. Now web publishers can enforce such appeals by luring scrapers to AI-generated decoy pages.

Mochi-style illustrated characters with diverse facial expressions used for AI emotion recognition visualizations.

Machine Learning Research

Interactive Voice-to-Voice With Vision: MoshiVis adds image understanding to voice-first conversations

Researchers updated the highly responsive Moshi voice-to-voice model to discuss visual input.

AI tutoring system interface showing real-time context integration, privacy, and expert-like feedback generation.

Tech & Society

LLM Support for Tutors: GPT-4 boosts remote tutors’ performance in real time, study finds

Students benefit from tutoring, but training tutors is expensive. A study shows that large language models can boost tutors’ effectiveness in real time.

GIF of AI-assisted art: A landscape is edited, a cyborg sketch turns photorealistic, and a cat reads a newspaper, showing human input for copyright

Business

Some AI-Generated Works Are Copyrightable: U.S. Copyright Office says that no new laws are needed for AI-generated works

The United States Copyright Office determined that existing laws are sufficient to decide whether a given AI-generated work is protected by copyright, making additional legislation unnecessary.

AYA Vision architecture diagram showing vision encoder, multimodal merging, and LLM backbone for image processing

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.

Illustration of a programmer at a computer displaying PyTorch code, while a smiling colleague gives a thumbs-up in approval.

Letters

Learn the Language of Software: AI won’t kill programming. There has never been a better time to start coding.

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.

AI model performance benchmark comparing R1 1776 and DeepSeek-R1 across MMLU, DROP, MATH-500, and AIME 2024 tests.

Tech & Society

DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored: Perplexity launches uncensored version of DeepSeek-R1

Large language models built by developers in China may, in some applications, be less useful outside that country because they avoid topics its government deems politically sensitive. A developer fine-tuned DeepSeek-R1 to widen its scope without degrading its overall performance.

Gavel striking a neural network, symbolizing legal decisions impacting AI and machine learning technologies.

Tech & Society

Judge Upholds Copyright in AI Training Case: U.S. court rejects fair use defense in Thomson Reuters AI lawsuit

A United States court delivered a major ruling that begins to answer the question whether, and under what conditions, training an AI system on copyrighted material is considered fair use that doesn’t require permission.

Amazon smart display with widgets for recipes, calendar, weather, events, and streaming (Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+).

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.