ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

• ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news

  Hey, it's Alex, coming to you fresh off another live recording of ThursdAI, and what an incredible one it's been! I was hoping that this week will be chill with the releases, because of NVIDIA's GTC conference, but no, the AI world doesn't stop, and if you blinked this week, you may have missed 2 or 10 major things that happened. From Mistral coming back to OSS with the amazing Mistral Small 3.1 (beating Gemma from last week!) to OpenAI dropping a new voice generation model, and 2! new whisper killer ASR models with a Breaking News during our live show (there's a reason we're called ThursdAI) which we watched together and then dissected with Kwindla, our amazing AI VOICE and real time expert. Not to mention that we also had dedicated breaking news from friend of the pod Joseph Nelson, that came on the show to announce a SOTA vision model from Roboflow + a new benchmark on which even the top VL models get around 6%! There's also a bunch of other OSS, a SOTA 3d model from Tencent and more! And last but not least, Yam is back 🎉 So... buckle up and let's dive in. As always, TL;DR and show notes at the end, and here's the YT live version. (While you're there, please hit subscribe and help me hit that 1K subs on YT 🙏 )Voice & Audio: OpenAI's Voice Revolution and the Open Source EchoHold the phone, everyone, because this week belonged to Voice & Audio! Seriously, if you weren't paying attention to the voice space, you missed a seismic shift, courtesy of OpenAI and some serious open-source contenders.OpenAI's New Voice Models - Whisper Gets an Upgrade, TTS Gets Emotional!OpenAI dropped a suite of next-gen audio models: gpt-4o-mini-tts-latest (text-to-speech) and GPT 4.0 Transcribe and GPT 4.0 Mini Transcribe (speech-to-text), all built upon their powerful transformer architecture.To unpack this voice revolution, we welcomed back Kwindla Cramer from Daily, the voice AI whisperer himself. The headline news? The new speech-to-text models are not just incremental improvements; they’re a whole new ballgame. As OpenAI’s Shenyi explained, "Our new generation model is based on our large speech model. This means this new model has been trained on trillions of audio tokens." They're faster, cheaper (Mini Transcribe is half price of Whisper!), and boast state-of-the-art accuracy across multiple languages. But the real kicker? They're promptable!"This basically opens up a whole field of prompt engineering for these models, which is crazy," I exclaimed, my mind officially blown. Imagine prompting your transcription model with context – telling it you're discussing dog breeds, and suddenly, its accuracy for breed names skyrockets. That's the power of promptable ASR! I recorded a live reaction aftder dropping of stream, and I was really impressed with how I can get the models to pronounce ThursdAI by just... asking! But the voice magic doesn't stop there. GPT 4.0 Mini TTS, the new text-to-speech model, can now be prompted for… emotions! "You can prompt to be emotional. You can ask it to do some stuff. You can prompt the character a voice," OpenAI even demoed a "Mad Scientist" voice! Captain Ryland voice, anyone? This is a huge leap forward in TTS, making AI voices sound… well, more human.But wait, there’s more! Semantic VAD! Semantic Voice Activity Detection, as OpenAI explained, "chunks the audio up based on when the model thinks The user's actually finished speaking." It’s about understanding the meaning of speech, not just detecting silence. Kwindla hailed it as "a big step forward," finally addressing the age-old problem of AI agents interrupting you mid-thought. No more robotic impatience!OpenAI also threw in noise reduction and conversation item retrieval, making these new voice models production-ready powerhouses. This isn't just an update; it's a voice AI revolution, folks.They also built a super nice website to test out the new models with openai.fm ! Canopy Labs' Orpheus 3B - Open Source Voice Steps UpBut hold on, the open-source voice community isn't about to be outshone! Canopy Labs dropped Orpheus 3B, a "natural sounding speech language model" with open-source spirit. Orpheus, available in multiple sizes (3B, 1B, 500M, 150M), boasts zero-shot voice cloning and a glorious Apache 2 license. Wolfram noted its current lack of multilingual support, but remained enthusiastic, I played with them a bit and they do sound quite awesome, but I wasn't able to finetune them on my own voice due to "CUDA OUT OF MEMORY" alasI did a live reaction recording for this model on XNVIDIA Canary - Open Source Speech Recognition Enters the RaceSpeaking of open source, NVIDIA surprised us with Canary, a speech recognition and translation model. "NVIDIA open sourced Canary, which is a 1 billion parameter and 180 million parameter speech recognition and translation, so basically like whisper competitor," I summarized. Canary is tiny, fast, and CC-BY licensed, allowing commercial use. It even snagged second place on the Hugging Face speech recognition leaderboard! Open source ASR just got a whole lot more interesting.Of course, this won't get to the level of the new SOTA ASR OpenAI just dropped, but this can run locally and allows commercial use on edge devices! ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Vision & Video: Roboflow's Visionary Model and Video Generation Gets MovingAfter the voice-apalooza, let's switch gears to the visual world, where Vision & Video delivered some knockout blows, spearheaded by Roboflow and StepFun.Roboflow's RF-DETR and RF100-VL - A New Vision SOTA EmergesRoboflow stole the vision spotlight this week with their RF-DETR model and the groundbreaking RF100-VL benchmark. We were lucky enough to have Joseph Nelson, Roboflow CEO, join the show again and give us the breaking news (they published the Github 11 minutes before he came on!) RF-DETR is Roboflow's first in-house model, a real-time object detection transformer that's rewriting the rulebook. "We've actually never released a model that we've developed. And so this is the first time where we've taken a lot of those learnings and put that into a model," Joseph revealed.And what a model it is! RF-DETR is not just fast; it's SOTA on real-world datasets and surpasses the 60 mAP barrier on COCO. But Joseph dropped a truth bomb: COCO is outdated. "The benchmark that everyone uses is, the COCO benchmark… hasn't been updated since 2017, but models have continued to get really, really, really good. And so they're saturated the COCO benchmark," he explained.Enter RF100-VL, Roboflow's revolutionary new benchmark, designed to evaluate vision-language models on real-world data. "We, introduced a benchmark that we call RF 100 vision language," Joseph announced. The results? Shockingly low zero-shot performance on real-world vision tasks, highlighting a major gap in current models. Joseph's quiz question about QwenVL 2.5's zero-shot performance on RF100-VL revealed a dismal 5.8% accuracy. "So we as a field have a long, long way to go before we have zero shot performance on real world context," Joseph concluded. RF100-VL is the new frontier for vision, and RF-DETR is leading the charge! Plus, it runs on edge devices and is Apache 2 licensed! Roboflow, you legends! Check out the RF-DETR Blog Post, the RF-DETR Github, and the RF100-VL Benchmark for more details!StepFun's Image-to-Video TI2V - Animating Images with StyleStepping into the video arena, StepFun released their image2video model, TI2V. TI2V boasts impressive motion controls and generates high-quality videos from images and text prompts, especially excelling in anime-style video generation. Dive into the TI2V HuggingFace Space and TI2V Github to explore further.Open Source LLMs: Mistral's Triumphant Return, LG's Fridge LLM, NVIDIA's Nemotron, and ByteDance's RL BoostLet's circle back to our beloved Open Source LLMs, where this week was nothing short of a gold rush!Mistral is BACK, Baby! - Mistral Small 3.1 24B (Again!)Seriously, Mistral AI's return to open source with Mistral Small 3.1 deserves another shoutout! "Mistral is back with open source. Let's go!" I cheered, and I meant it. This multimodal, Apache 2 licensed model is a powerhouse, outperforming Gemma 3 and ready for action on a single GPU. Wolfram, ever the pragmatist, noted, "We are in right now, where a week later, you already have some new toys to play with." referring to Gemma 3 that we covered just last week! Not only did we get a great new update from Mistral, they also cited our friends at Nous research and their Deep Hermes (released just last week!) for the reason to release the base models alongside finetuned models! Mistral Small 3.1 is not just a model; it's a statement: open source is thriving, and Mistral is leading the charge! Check out their Blog Post, the HuggingFace page, and the Base Model on HF. NVIDIA Nemotron - Distilling, Pruning, Making Llama's BetterNVIDIA finally dropped Llama Nemotron, and it was worth the wait! Nemotron Nano (8B) and Super (49B) are here, with Ultra (253B) on the horizon. These models are distilled, pruned, and, crucially, designed for reasoning with a hybrid architecture allowing you to enable and disable reasoning via a simple on/off switch in the system prompt! Beating other reasoners like QwQ on GPQA tasks, this distillined and pruned LLama based reasoner seems very powerful! Congrats to NVIDIAChris Alexius (a friend of the pod) who co-authored the announcement, told me that FP8 is expected and when that drops, this model will also fit on a single H100 GPU, making it really great for enterprises who host on their own hardware. And yes, it’s ready for commercial use. NVIDIA, welcome to the open-source LLM party! Explore the Llama-Nemotron HuggingFace Collection and the Dataset.LG Enters the LLM Fray with EXAONE Deep 32B - Fridge AI is Officially a ThingLG, yes, that LG, surprised everyone by open-sourcing EXAONE Deep 32B, a "thinking model" from the fridge and TV giant. "LG open sources EXAONE and EXAONE Deep 32B thinking model," I announced, still slightly amused by the fridge-LLM concept. This 32B parameter model claims "superior capabilities" in reasoning, and while my live test in LM Studio went a bit haywire, quantization could be the culprit. It's non-commercial, but hey, fridge-powered AI is now officially a thing. Who saw that coming? Check out my Reaction Video, the LG Blog, and the HuggingFace page for more info.ByteDance's DAPO - Reinforcement Learning Gets EfficientFrom the creators of TikTok, ByteDance, comes DAPO, a new reinforcement learning method that's outperforming GRPO. DAPO promises 50% accuracy on AIME 2024 with 50% less training steps. Nisten, our RL expert, explained it's a refined GRPO, pushing the boundaries of RL efficiency. Open source RL is getting faster and better, thanks to ByteDance! Dive into the X thread, Github, and Paper for the technical details.Big CO LLMs + APIs: Google's Generosity, OpenAI's Oligarch Pricing, and GTC ManiaSwitching gears to the Big CO LLM arena, we saw Google making moves for the masses, OpenAI catering to the elite, and NVIDIA… well, being NVIDIA.Google Makes DeepResearch Free and Adds CanvasGoogle is opening up DeepResearch to everyone for FREE! DeepResearch, Gemini's advanced search mode, is now accessible without a Pro subscription. I really like it's revamped UI where you can see the thinking and the sources! I used it live on the show to find out what we talked about in the latest episode of ThursdAI, and it did a pretty good job! Plus, Google unveiled Canvas, letting you "build apps within Gemini and actually see them." Google is making Gemini more accessible and more powerful, a win for everyone. Here's a Tetris game it built for me and here's a markdown enabled word counter I rebuild every week before I send ThursdAI (making sure I don't send you 10K words every week 😅)OpenAI's O1 Pro API - Pricey Power for the FewOpenAI, in contrast, released O1 Pro API, but with a price tag that's… astronomical. "OpenAI makes O1-pro API available to oligarchs ($600/1mtok output!)," I quipped, highlighting the exclusivity. $600 per million output tokens? "If you code with this, if you vibe code with this, you better already have VCs backing your startup," I warned. O1 Pro might be top-tier performance, but it's priced for the 0.1%.NVIDIA GTC Recap - Jensen's Hardware ExtravaganzaNVIDIA GTC was, as always, a hardware spectacle. New GPUs (Blackwell Ultra, Vera Rubin, Feynman!), the tiny DGX Spark supercomputer, the GR00T robot foundation model, and the Blue robot – NVIDIA is building the AI future, brick by silicon brick. Jensen is the AI world's rockstar, and GTC is his sold-out stadium show. Check out Rowan Cheung's GTC Recap on X for a quick overview.Shoutout to our team at GTC and this amazingly timed logo shot I took from the live stream! Antropic adds Web SearchWe had a surprise at the end of the show, with Antropic releasing web search. It's a small thing, but for folks who use Cloud AI, it's very important.You can now turn on web search directly on Claude which makes it... the last frontier lab to enable this feature 😂 Congrats! AI Art & Diffusion & 3D: Tencent's 3D RevolutionTencent Hunyuan 3D 2.0 MV and Turbo - 3D Generation Gets Real-TimeTencent updated Hunyuan 3D to 2.0 MV (MultiView) and Turbo, pushing the boundaries of 3D generation. Hunyuan 3D 2.0 surpasses SOTA in geometry, texture, and alignment, and the Turbo version achieves near real-time 3D generation – under one second on an H100! Try out the Hunyuan3D-2mv HF Space to generate your own 3D masterpieces! MultiView (MV) is another game-changer, allowing you to input 1-4 views for more accurate 3D models. "MV allows to generate 3d shapes from 1-4 views making the 3D shapes much higher quality" I explained. The demo of generating a 3D mouse from Gemini-generated images showcased the seamless pipeline from thought to 3D object. I literally just asked Gemini with native image generation to generate a character and then Holodecks are getting closer, folks!Closing Remarks and Thank YouAnd that's all she wrote, folks! Another week, another AI explosion. From voice to vision, open source to Big CO, this week was a whirlwind of innovation. Huge thanks again to our incredible guests, Joseph Nelson from Roboflow, Kwindla Cramer from Daily, and Lucas Atkins from ARCEE! And of course, massive shoutout to my co-hosts, Wolfram, Yam, and Nisten – you guys are the best!And YOU, the ThursdAI community, are the reason we do this. Thank you for tuning in, for your support, and for being as hyped about AI as we are. Remember, ThursdAI is a labor of love, fueled by Weights & Biases and a whole lot of passion.Missed anything? thursdai.news is your one-stop shop for the podcast, newsletter, and video replay. And seriously, subscribe to our YouTube channel! Let's get to 1000 subs!Helpful? We’d love to see you here again! TL;DR and Show Notes:* Guests and Cohosts* Alex Volkov - AI Evangelist & Weights & Biases (@altryne)Co Hosts - @WolframRvnwlf @yampeleg @nisten* Sponsor - Weights & Biases Weave (@weave_wb)* Joseph Nelson - CEO Roboflow (@josephofiowa)* Kindwla Kramer - CEO Daily (@kwindla)* Lucas Atkins - Labs team at Arcee lead (@LukasAtkins7)* Open Source LLMs * Mistral Small 3.1 24B - Multimodal (Blog, HF, HF base)* LG open sources EXAONE and EXAONE Deep 32B thinking model (Alex Reaction Video, LG BLOG, HF)* ByteDance releases DAPO - better than GRPO RL Method (X, Github, Paper)* NVIDIA drops LLama-Nemotron (Super 49B, Nano 8B) with reasoning and data (X, HF, Dataset)* Big CO LLMs + APIs* Google makes DeepResearch free, Canvas added, Live Previews (X)* OpenAI makes O1-pro API available to oligarchs ($600/1mtok output!)* NVIDIA GTC recap - (X)* This weeks Buzz* Come visit the Weights & Biases team at GTC today! * Vision & Video* Roboflow drops RF-DETR a SOTA vision model + new eval RF100-VL for VLMs (Blog, Github, Benchmark)* StepFun dropped their image2video model TI2V (HF, Github)* Voice & Audio* OpenAI launches a new voice model and 2 new transcription models (Blog, Youtube)* Canopy Labs drops Orpheus 3B (1B, 500B, 150M versions) - natural sounding speech language model (Blog, HF, Colab)* NVIDIA Canary 1B/180M Flash - apache 2 speech recognition and translation LLama finetune (HF)* AI Art & Diffusion & 3D* Tencent updates Hunyuan 3D 2.0 MV (MultiView) and Turbo (HF)* Tools* ARCEE Conductor - model router (X)* Cursor ships Claude 3.7 MAX (X)* Notebook LM teases MindMaps (X)* Gemini Co-Drawing - using Gemini native image output for helping drawing (HF) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe

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  1:51:29
• 📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news

  LET'S GO! Happy second birthday to ThursdAI, your favorite weekly AI news show! Can you believe it's been two whole years since we jumped into that random Twitter Space to rant about GPT-4? From humble beginnings as a late-night Twitter chat to a full-blown podcast, Newsletter and YouTube show with hundreds of thousands of downloads, it's been an absolutely wild ride! That's right, two whole years of me, Alex Volkov, your friendly AI Evangelist, along with my amazing co-hosts, trying to keep you up-to-date on the breakneck speed of the AI worldAnd what better way to celebrate than with a week PACKED with insane AI news? Buckle up, folks, because this week Google went OPEN SOURCE crazy, Gemini got even cooler, OpenAI created a whole new Agents SDK and the open-source community continues to blow our minds. We’ve got it all - from game-changing model releases to mind-bending demos.This week I'm also on the Weights & Biases company retreat, so TL;DR first and then the newsletter, but honestly, I'll start embedding the live show here in the substack from now on, because we're getting so good at it, I barely have to edit lately and there's a LOT to show you guys! TL;DR and Show Notes & Links* Hosts & Guests* Alex Volkov - AI Eveangelist & Weights & Biases (@altryne)* Co Hosts - @WolframRvnwlf @ldjconfirmed @nisten * Sandra Kublik - DevRel at Cohere (@itsSandraKublik)* Open Source LLMs * Google open sources Gemma 3 - 1B - 27B - 128K context (Blog, AI Studio, HF)* EuroBERT - multilingual encoder models (210M to 2.1B params)* Reka Flash 3 (reasoning) 21B parameters is open sourced (Blog, HF)* Cohere Command A 111B model - 256K context (Blog)* Nous Research Deep Hermes 24B / 3B Hybrid Reasoners (X, HF)* AllenAI OLMo 2 32B - fully open source GPT4 level model (X, Blog, Try It)* Big CO LLMs + APIs* Gemini Flash generates images natively (X, AI Studio)* Google deep research is now free in Gemini app and powered by Gemini Thinking (Try It no cost)* OpenAI released new responses API, Web Search, File search and Computer USE tools (X, Blog)* This weeks Buzz * The whole company is at an offsite at oceanside, CA* W&B internal MCP hackathon and had cool projects - launching an MCP server soon!* Vision & Video* Remade AI - 8 LORA video effects for WANX (HF)* AI Art & Diffusion & 3D* ByteDance Seedream 2.0 - A Native Chinese-English Bilingual Image Generation Foundation Model by ByteDance (Blog, Paper)* Tools* Everyone's talking about Manus - (manus.im)* Google AI studio now supports youtube understanding via link droppingOpen Source LLMs: Gemma 3, EuroBERT, Reka Flash 3, and Cohere Command-A Unleashed!This week was absolutely HUGE for open source, folks. Google dropped a BOMBSHELL with Gemma 3! As Wolfram pointed out, this is a "very technical achievement," and it's not just one model, but a whole family ranging from 1 billion to 27 billion parameters. And get this – the 27B model can run on a SINGLE GPU! Sundar Pichai himself claimed you’d need "at least 10X compute to get similar performance from other models." Insane!Gemma 3 isn't just about size; it's packed with features. We're talking multimodal capabilities (text, images, and video!), support for over 140 languages, and a massive 128k context window. As Nisten pointed out, "it might actually end up being the best at multimodal in that regard" for local models. Plus, it's fine-tuned for safety and comes with ShieldGemma 2 for content moderation. You can grab Gemma 3 on Google AI Studio, Hugging Face, Ollama, Kaggle – everywhere! Huge shoutout to Omar Sanseviero and the Google team for this incredible release and for supporting the open-source community from day one! Colin aka Bartowski, was right, "The best thing about Gemma is the fact that Google specifically helped the open source communities to get day one support." This is how you do open source right!Next up, we have EuroBERT, a new family of multilingual encoder models. Wolfram, our European representative, was particularly excited about this one: "In European languages, you have different characters than in other languages. And, um, yeah, encoding everything properly is, uh, difficult." Ranging from 210 million to 2.1 billion parameters, EuroBERT is designed to push the boundaries of NLP in European and global languages. With training on a massive 5 trillion-token dataset across 15 languages and support for 8K context tokens, EuroBERT is a workhorse for RAG and other NLP tasks. Plus, how cool is their mascot?Reka Flash 3 - a 21B reasoner with apache 2 trained with RLOOAnd the open source train keeps rolling! Reka AI dropped Reka Flash 3, a 21 billion parameter reasoning model with an Apache 2.0 license! Nisten was blown away by the benchmarks: "This might be one of the best like 20B size models that there is right now. And it's Apache 2.0. Uh, I, I think this is a much bigger deal than most people realize." Reka Flash 3 is compact, efficient, and excels at chat, coding, instruction following, and function calling. They even used a new reinforcement learning technique called REINFORCE Leave One-Out (RLOO). Go give it a whirl on Hugging Face or their chat interface – chat.reka.ai!Last but definitely not least in the open-source realm, we had a special guest, Sandra (@itsSandraKublik) from Cohere, join us to announce Command-A! This beast of a model clocks in at 111 BILLION parameters with a massive 256K context window. Sandra emphasized its efficiency, "It requires only two GPUs. Typically the models of this size require 32 GPUs. So it's a huge, huge difference." Command-A is designed for enterprises, focusing on agentic tasks, tool use, and multilingual performance. It's optimized for private deployments and boasts enterprise-grade security. Congrats to Sandra and the Cohere team on this massive release!Big CO LLMs + APIs: Gemini Flash Gets Visual, Deep Research Goes Free, and OpenAI Builds for AgentsThe big companies weren't sleeping either! Google continued their awesome week by unleashing native image generation in Gemini Flash Experimental! This is seriously f*****g cool, folks! Sorry for my French, but it’s true. You can now directly interact with images, tell Gemini what to do, and it just does it. We even showed it live on the stream, turning ourselves into cat-confetti-birthday-hat-wearing masterpieces! Wolfram was right, "It's also a sign what we will see in, like, Photoshop, for example. Where you, you expect to just talk to it and have it do everything that a graphic designer would be doing." The future of creative tools is HERE.And guess what else Google did? They made Deep Research FREE in the Gemini app and powered by Gemini Thinking! Nisten jumped in to test it live, and we were all impressed. "This is the nicest interface so far that I've seen," he said. Deep Research now digs through HUNDREDS of websites (Nisten’s test hit 156!) to give you comprehensive answers, and the interface is slick and user-friendly. Plus, you can export to Google Docs! Intelligence too cheap to meter? Google is definitely pushing that boundary.Last second additions - Allen Institute for AI released OLMo 2 32B - their biggest open model yetJust as I'm writing this, friend of the pod, Nathan from Allen Institute for AI announced the release of a FULLY OPEN OLMo 2, which includes weights, code, dataset, everything and apparently it beats the latest GPT 3.5, GPT 4o mini, and leading open weight models like Qwen and Mistral. Evals look legit, but nore than that, this is an Apache 2 model with everything in place to advance open AI and open science! Check out Nathans tweet for more info, and congrats to Allen team for this awesome release! OpenAI new responses API and Agent ASK with Web, File and CUA toolsOf course, OpenAI wasn't going to let Google have all the fun. They dropped a new SDK for agents called the Responses API. This is a whole new way to build with OpenAI, designed specifically for the agentic era we're entering. They also released three new tools: Web Search, Computer Use Tool, and File Search Tool. The Web Search tool is self-explanatory – finally, built-in web search from OpenAI!The Computer Use Tool, while currently limited in availability, opens up exciting possibilities for agent automation, letting agents interact with computer interfaces. And the File Search Tool gives you a built-in RAG system, simplifying knowledge retrieval from your own files. As always, OpenAI is adapting to the agentic world and giving developers more power.Finally in the big company space, Nous Research released PORTAL, their new Inference API service. Now you can access their awesome models, like Hermes 3 Llama 70B and DeepHermes 3 8B, directly via API. It's great to see more open-source labs offering API access, making these powerful models even more accessible.This Week's Buzz at Weights & Biases: Offsite Hackathon and MCP Mania!This week's "This Week's Buzz" segment comes to you live from Oceanside, California! The whole Weights & Biases team is here for our company offsite. Despite the not-so-sunny California weather (thanks, storm!), it's been an incredible week of meeting colleagues, strategizing, and HACKING!And speaking of hacking, we had an MCP hackathon! After last week’s MCP-pilling episode, we were all hyped about Model Context Protocol, and the team didn't disappoint. In just three hours, the innovation was flowing! We saw agents built for WordPress, MCP support integrated into Weave playground, and even MCP servers for Weights & Biases itself! Get ready, folks, because an MCP server for Weights & Biases is COMING SOON! You'll be able to talk to your W&B data like never before. Huge shoutout to the W&B team for their incredible talent and for embracing the agentic future! And in case you missed it, Weights & Biases is now part of the CoreWeave family! Exciting times ahead!Vision & Video: LoRA Video Effects and OpenSora 2.0Moving into vision and video, Remade AI released 8 LoRA video effects for 1X! Remember 1X from Alibaba? Now you can add crazy effects like "squish," "inflate," "deflate," and even "cakeify" to your videos using LoRAs. It's open source and super cool to see video effects becoming trainable and customizable.And in the realm of open-source video generation, OpenSora 2.0 dropped! This 11 billion parameter model claims state-of-the-art video generation trained for just $200,000! They’re even claiming performance close to Sora itself on some benchmarks. Nisten checked out the demos, and while we're all a bit jaded now with the rapid pace of video AI, it's still mind-blowing how far we've come. Open source video is getting seriously impressive, seriously fast.AI Art & Diffusion & 3D: ByteDance's Bilingual Seedream 2.0ByteDance, the folks behind TikTok, released Seedream 2.0, a native Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model. This model, from ByteDream, excels at text rendering, cultural nuance, and human preference alignment. Seedream 2.0 boasts "powerful general capability," "native bilingual comprehension ability," and "excellent text rendering." It's designed to understand both Chinese and English prompts natively, generating high-quality, culturally relevant images. The examples look stunning, especially its ability to render Chinese text beautifully.Tools: Manus AI Agent, Google AI Studio YouTube Links, and Cursor EmbeddingsFinally, in the tools section, everyone's buzzing about Manus, a new AI research agent. We gave it a try live on the show, asking it to do some research. The UI is slick, and it seems to be using Claude 3.7 behind the scenes. Manus creates a to-do list, browses the web in a real Chrome browser, and even generates files. It's like Operator on steroids. We'll be keeping an eye on Manus and will report back on its performance in future episodes.And Google AI Studio keeps getting better! Now you can drop YouTube links into Google AI Studio, and it will natively understand the video! This is HUGE for video analysis and content understanding. Imagine using this for support, content summarization, and so much more.PHEW! What a week to celebrate two years of ThursdAI! From open source explosions to Gemini's visual prowess and OpenAI's agentic advancements, the AI world is moving faster than ever. As Wolfram aptly put it, "The acceleration, you can feel it." And Nisten reminded us of the incredible journey, "I remember I had early access to GPT-4 32K, and, uh, then... the person for the contract that had given me access, they cut it off because on the one weekend, I didn't realize how expensive it was. So I had to use $180 worth of tokens just trying it out." Now, we have models that are more powerful and more accessible than ever before. Thank you to Wolfram, Nisten, and LDJ for co-hosting and bringing their insights every week. And most importantly, THANK YOU to our amazing community for tuning in, listening, and supporting ThursdAI for two incredible years! We couldn't do it without you. Here's to another year of staying up-to-date so YOU don't have to! Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, YouTube channel, and newsletter to stay in the loop. And share ThursdAI with a friend – it's the best birthday gift you can give us! Until next week, keep building and keep exploring the amazing world of AI! LET'S GO! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe

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  1:32:04
• ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!

  What is UP folks! Alex here from Weights & Biases (yeah, still, but check this weeks buzz section below for some news!) I really really enjoyed today's episode, I feel like I can post it unedited it was so so good. We started the show with our good friend Junyang Lin from Alibaba Qwen, where he told us about their new 32B reasoner QwQ. Then we interviewed Google's VP of the search product, Robby Stein, who came and told us about their upcoming AI mode in Google! I got access and played with it, and it made me switch back from PPXL as my main. And lastly, I recently became fully MCP-pilled, since we covered it when it came out over thanksgiving, I saw this acronym everywhere on my timeline but only recently "got it" and so I wanted to have an MCP deep dive, and boy... did I get what I wished for! You absolutely should tune in to the show as there's no way for me to cover everything we covered about MCP with Dina and Jason! ok without, further adieu.. let's dive in (and the TL;DR, links and show notes in the end as always!) ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.🤯 Alibaba's QwQ-32B: Small But Shocking Everyone!The open-source LLM segment started strong, chatting with friend of the show Junyang Justin Lin from Alibaba’s esteemed Qwen team. They've cooked up something quite special: QwQ-32B, a reasoning-focused, reinforcement-learning-boosted beast that punches remarkably above its weight. We're talking about a mere 32B parameters model holding its ground on tough evaluations against DeepSeek R1, a 671B behemoth!Here’s how wild this is: You can literally run QwQ on your Mac! Junyang shared that they applied two solid rounds of RL to amp its reasoning, coding, and math capabilities, integrating agents into the model to fully unlock its abilities. When I called out how insane it was that we’ve gone from "LLMs can't do math" to basically acing competitive math benchmarks like AIME24, Junyang calmly hinted that they're already aiming for unified thinking/non-thinking models. Sounds wild, doesn’t it?Check out the full QwQ release here, or dive into their blog post.🚀 Google Launches AI Mode: Search Goes Next-Level (X, Blog, My Live Reaction).For the past two years, on this very show, we've been asking, "Where's Google?" in the Gen AI race. Well, folks, they're back. And they're back in a big way.Next, we were thrilled to have Google’s own Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, drop by ThursdAI after their massive launch of AI Mode and expanded AI Overviews leveraging Gemini 2.0. Robby walked us through this massive shift, which essentially brings advanced conversational AI capabilities straight into Google. Seriously — Gemini 2.0 is now out here doing complex reasoning while performing fan-out queries behind the scenes in Google's infrastructure.Google search is literally Googling itself. No joke. "We actually have the model generating fan-out queries — Google searches within searches — to collect accurate, fresh, and verified data," explained Robby during our chat. And I gotta admit, after playing with AI Mode, Google is definitely back in the game—real-time restaurant closures, stock analyses, product comparisons, and it’s conversational to boot. You can check my blind reaction first impression video here. (also, while you're there, why not subscribe to my YT?)Google has some huge plans, but right now AI Mode is rolling out slowly via Google Labs for Google One AI Premium subscribers first. More soon though!🐝 This Week's Buzz: Weights & Biases Joins CoreWeave Family!Huge buzz (in every sense of the word) from Weights & Biases, who made waves with their announcement this week: We've joined forces with CoreWeave! Yeah, that's big news as CoreWeave, the AI hyperscaler known for delivering critical AI infrastructure, has now acquired Weights & Biases to build the ultimate end-to-end AI platform. It's early days of this exciting journey, and more details are emerging, but safe to say: the future of Weights & Biases just got even more exciting. Congrats to the whole team at Weights & Biases and our new colleagues at CoreWeave!We're committed to all users of WandB so you will be able to keep using Weights & Biases, and we'll continuously improve our offerings going forward! Personally, also nothing changes for ThursdAI! 🎉MCP Takes Over: Giving AI agents super powers via standardized protocol Then things got insanely exciting. Why? Because MCP is blowing up and I had to find out why everyone's timeline (mine included) just got invaded.Welcoming Cloudflare’s amazing product manager Dina Kozlov and Jason Kneen—MCP master and creator—things quickly got mind-blowing. MCP servers, Jason explained, are essentially tool wrappers that effortlessly empower agents with capabilities like API access and even calling other LLMs—completely seamlessly and securely. According to Jason, "we haven't even touched the surface yet of what MCP can do—these things are Lego bricks ready to form swarms and even self-evolve."Dina broke down just how easy it is to launch MCP servers on Cloudflare Workers while teasing exciting upcoming enhancements. Both Dina and Jason shared jaw-dropping examples, including composing complex workflows connecting Git, Jira, Gmail, and even smart home controls—practically instantaneously! Seriously, my mind is still spinning.The MCP train is picking up steam, and something tells me we'll be talking about this revolutionary agent technology a lot more soon. Check out two great MCP directories that popped up this recently: Smithery, Cursor Directory and Composio.This show was one of the best ones we recorded, honestly, I barely need to edit it. It was also a really really fun livestream, so if you prefer seeing to listening, here's the lightly edited live streamThank you for being a ThursdAI subscriber, as always here's the TL:DR and shownotes for everything that happened in AI this week and the things we mentioned (and hosts we had)ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.TL;DR and Show Notes * Show Notes & Guests* Alex Volkov - AI Eveangelist & Weights & Biases (@altryne)* Co Hosts - @WolframRvnwlf @ldjconfirmed @nisten* Junyang Justin Lin - Head of Qwen Team, Alibaba - @JustinLin610* Robby Stein - VP of Product, Google Search - @rmstein* Dina Kozlov - Product Manager, Cloudflare - @dinasaur_404* Jason Kneen - MCP Wiz - @jasonkneen* My Google AI Mode Blind Reaction Video (Youtube)* Sesame Maya Conversation Demo - (Youtube)* Cloudflare MCP docs (Blog)* Weights & Biases Agents Course Pre-signup - https://wandb.me/agents* Open Source LLMs* Qwen's latest reasoning model QwQ-32B - matches R1 on some evals (X, Blog, HF, Chat)* Cohere4ai - Aya Vision - 8B & 32B (X, HF)* AI21 - Jamba 1.6 Large & Jamba 1.6 Mini (X, HF)* Big CO LLMs + APIs* Google announces AI Mode & AI Overviews Gemini 2.0 (X, Blog, My Live Reaction)* OpenAI rolls out GPT 4.5 to plus users - #1 on LM Arena 🔥 (X)* Grok Voice is available for free users as well (X)* Elysian Labs launches Auren ios app (X, App Store)* Mistral announces SOTA OCR (Blog)* This weeks Buzz* Weights & Biases is acquired by CoreWeave 🎉 (Blog)* Vision & Video* Tencent HYVideo img2vid is finally here (X, HF, Try It)* Voice & Audio* NotaGen - symbolic music generation model high-quality classical sheet music Github, Demo, HF* Sesame takes the world by storm with their amazing voice model (My Reaction)* AI Art & Diffusion & 3D* MiniMax__AI - Image-01: A Versatile Text-to-Image Model at 1/10 the Cost (X, Try it)* Zhipu AI - CogView 4 6B - (X, Github)* Tools* Google - DataScience agent in GoogleColab Blog* Baidu Miaoda - nocode AI build tool This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe

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• 📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news

  Hey all, Alex here 👋What can I say, the weeks are getting busier , and this is one of those "crazy full" weeks in AI. As we were about to start recording, OpenAI teased GPT 4.5 live stream, and we already had a very busy show lined up (Claude 3.7 vibes are immaculate, Grok got an unhinged voice mode) and I had an interview with Kevin Hou from Windsurf scheduled! Let's dive in! 🔥 GPT 4.5 (ORION) is here - worlds largest LLM (10x GPT4o) OpenAI has finally shipped their next .5 model, which is 10x scale from the previous model. We didn't cover this on the podcast but did watch the OpenAI live stream together after the podcast concluded. A very interesting .5 release from OpenAI, where even Sam Altman says "this model won't crush on benchmarks" and is not the most frontier model, but is OpenAI's LARGEST model by far (folks are speculating 10+ Trillions of parameters) After 2 years of smaller models and distillations, we finally got a new BIG model, that shows scaling laws proper, and while on some benchmarks it won't compete against reasoning models, this model will absolutely fuel a huge increase in capabilities even for reasoners, once o-series models will be trained on top of this. Here's a summary of the announcement and quick vibes recap (from folks who had access to it before) * OpenAI's largest, most knowledgeable model.* Increased world knowledge: 62.5% on SimpleQA, 71.4% GPQA* Better in creative writing, programming, problem-solving (no native step-by-step reasoning).* Text and image input and text output* Available in ChatGPT Pro and API access (API supports Function Calling, Structured Output)* Knowledge Cutoff is October 2023.* Context Window is 128,000 tokens.* Max Output is 16,384 tokens.* Pricing (per 1M tokens): Input: $75, Output: $150, Cached Input: $37.50.* Foundation for future reasoning models4.5 Vibes RecapTons of folks who had access are pointing to the same thing, while this model is not beating others on evals, it's much better at multiple other things, namely creative writing, recommending songs, improved vision capability and improved medical diagnosis. Karpathy said "Everything is a little bit better and it's awesome, but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to" and posted a thread of pairwise comparisons of tone on his X threadThough the reaction is bifurcated as many are upset with the high price of this model (10x more costly on outputs) and the fact that it's just marginally better at coding tasks. Compared to the newerSonnet (Sonnet 3.7) and DeepSeek, folks are looking at OpenAI and asking, why isn't this way better? Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet: A Coding PowerhouseAnthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and the immediate reaction from the community was overwhelmingly positive. With 8x more output capability (64K) and reasoning built in, this model is an absolute coding powerhouse. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the new king of coding models, achieving a remarkable 70% on the challenging SWE-Bench benchmark, and the initial user feedback is stellar, though vibes started to shift a bit towards Thursday.Ranking #1 on WebDev arena, and seemingly trained on UX and websites, Claude Sonnet 3.7 (AKA NewerSonner) has been blowing our collective minds since it was released on Monday, especially due to introducing Thinking and reasoning in a combined model. Now, since the start of the week, the community actually had time to play with it, and some of them return to sonnet 3.5 and saying that while the model is generally much more capable, it tends to generate tons of things that are unnecessary. I wonder if the shift is due to Cursor/Windsurf specific prompts, or the model's larger output context, and we'll keep you updated on if the vibes shift again. Open Source LLMsThis week was HUGE for open source, folks. We saw releases pushing the boundaries of speed, multimodality, and even the very way LLMs generate text!DeepSeek's Open Source SpreeDeepSeek went on an absolute tear, open-sourcing a treasure trove of advanced tools and techniques:This isn't your average open-source dump, folks. We're talking FlashMLA (efficient decoding on Hopper GPUs), DeepEP (an optimized communication library for MoE models), DeepGEMM (an FP8 GEMM library that's apparently ridiculously fast), and even parallelism strategies like DualPipe and EPLB.They are releasing some advanced stuff for training and optimization of LLMs, you can follow all their releases on their X accountDual Pipe seems to be the one that got most attention from the community, which is an incredible feat in pipe parallelism, that even got the cofounder of HuggingFace super excitedMicrosoft's Phi-4: Multimodal and Mini (Blog, HuggingFace)Microsoft joined the party with Phi-4-multimodal (5.6B parameters) and Phi-4-mini (3.8B parameters), showing that small models can pack a serious punch.These models are a big deal. Phi-4-multimodal can process text, images, and audio, and it actually beats WhisperV3 on transcription! As Nisten said, "This is a new model and, I'm still reserving judgment until, until I tried it, but it looks ideal for, for a portable size that you can run on the phone and it's multimodal." It even supports a wide range of languages. Phi-4-mini, on the other hand, is all about speed and efficiency, perfect for finetuning.Diffusion LLMs: Mercury Coder and LLaDA (X , Try it)This is where things get really interesting. We saw not one, but two diffusion-based LLMs this week: Mercury Coder from Inception Labs and LLaDA 8B. (Although, ok, to be fair, LLaDa released 2 weeks ago I was just busy)For those who don't know, diffusion is usually used for creating things like images. The idea of using it to generate text is like saying, "Okay, there's a revolutionary tool for painting; I'll write the code using it." Inception Labs' Mercury Coder is claiming over 1000 tokens per second on NVIDIA H100s – that's insane speed, usually only seen with specialized chips! Nisten spent hours digging into these, noting, "This is a complete breakthrough and, it just hasn't quite hit yet that this just happened because people thought for a while it should be possible because then you can do, you can do multiple token prediction at once". He explained that these models combine a regular LLM with a diffusion component, allowing them to generate multiple tokens simultaneously and excel at tasks like "fill in the middle" coding.LLaDA 8B, on the other hand, is an open-source attempt, and while it needs more training, it shows the potential of this approach. LDJ pointed out that LLaDA is "trained on like around five times or seven times less data while already like competing with LLAMA3 AP with same parameter count".Are diffusion LLMs the future? It's too early to say, but the speed gains are very intriguing.Magma 8B: Robotics LLM from MicrosoftMicrosoft dropped Magma 8B, a Microsoft Research project, an open-source model that combines vision and language understanding with the ability to control robotic actions.Nisten was particularly hyped about this one, calling it "the robotics. LLM." He sees it as a potential game-changer for robotics companies, allowing them to build robots that can understand visual input, respond to language commands, and act in the real world.OpenAI's Deep Research for Everyone (Well, Plus Subscribers)OpenAI finally brought Deep Research, its incredible web-browsing and research tool, to Plus subscribers.I've been saying this for a while: Deep Research is another ChatGPT moment. It's that good. It goes out, visits websites, understands your query in context, and synthesizes information like nothing else. As Nisten put it, "Nothing comes close to OpenAI's Deep Research...People like pull actual economics data, pull actual stuff." If you haven't tried it, you absolutely should.Our full coverage of Deep Research is here if you haven't yet listened, it's incredible. Alexa Gets an AI Brain Upgrade with Alexa+Amazon finally announced Alexa+, the long-awaited LLM-powered upgrade to its ubiquitous voice assistant.Alexa+ will be powered by Claude (and sometimes Nova), offering a much more conversational and intelligent experience, with integrations across Amazon services.This is a huge deal. For years, Alexa has felt… well, dumb, compared to the advancements in LLMs. Now, it's getting a serious intelligence boost, thanks to Anthropic's Claude. It'll be able to handle complex conversations, control smart home devices, and even perform tasks across various Amazon services. Imagine asking Alexa, "Did I let the dog out today?" and it actually checking your Ring camera footage to give you an answer! (Although, as I joked, let's hope it doesn't start setting houses on fire.)Also very intriguing is the new SDKs they are releasing to connect Alexa+ to all kinds of experience, I think this is huge and will absolutely create a new industry of applications built for voice Alexa. Alexa Web Actions for example will allow Alexa to navigate to a website and complete actions (think order Uber Eats) The price? 20$/mo but free if you're a Amazon Prime subscriber, which is most of the US households at this point. They are focusing on personalization and memory, though still unclear how that's going to be handled, and the ability to share documents like schedules I'm very much looking forward to smart Alexa, and to be able to say "Alexa, set a timer for the amount of time it takes to hard boil an egg, and flash my house lights when the timer is done" Grok Gets a Voice... and It's UNHINGEDGrok, Elon Musk's AI, finally got a voice mode, and… well, it's something else.One-sentence summary: Grok's new voice mode includes an "unhinged" 18+ option that curses like a sailor, along with other personality settings.Yes, you read that right. There's literally an "unhinged" setting in the UI. We played it live on the show, and... well, let's just say it's not for the faint of heart (or for kids). Here's a taste:Alex: "Hey there."Grok: "Yo, Alex. What's good, you horny b*****d? How's your day been so far? Fucked up or just mildly shitty?"Beyond the shock value, the voice mode is actually quite impressive in its expressiveness and ability to understand interruptions. It has several personalities, from a helpful "Grok Doc" to an "argumentative" mode that will disagree with everything you say. It's... unique.This Week's Buzz (WandB-Related News)Agents Course is Coming!We announced our upcoming agents course! You can pre-sign up HERE . This is going to be a deep dive into building and deploying AI agents, so don't miss it!AI Engineer Summit RecapWe briefly touched on the AI Engineer Summit in New York, where we met with Kevin Hou and many other brilliant minds in the AI space. The theme was "Agents at Work," and it was a fantastic opportunity to see the latest developments in agent technology. I gave a talk about reasoning agents and had a workshop about evaluations on Saturday, and saw many listeners of ThursdAI 👏 ✋ Interview with Kevin Hou from WindsurfThis week we had the pleasure of chatting with Kevin Hou from Windsurf about their revolutionary AI editor. Windsurf isn't just another IDE, it's an agentic IDE. As Kevin explained, "we made the pretty bold decision of saying, all right, we're not going to do chat... we are just going to [do] agent." They've built Windsurf from the ground up with an agent-first approach, and it’s making waves.Kevin walked us through the evolution of AI coding tools, from autocomplete to chat, and now to agents. He highlighted the "magical experiences" users are having, like debugging complex code with AI assistance that actually understands the context. We also delved into the challenges – memory, checkpointing, and cost.We also talked about the burning question: vibe coding. Is coding as we know it dead? Kevin’s take was nuanced: "there's an in between state that I really vibe or like gel with, which is,the scaffolding of what you want… Let's use, let's like vibe code and purely use the agent to accomplish this sort of commit." He sees AI agents raising the bar for software quality, demanding better UX, testing, and overall polish.And of course, we had to ask about the elephant in the room – why are so many people switching from Cursor to Windsurf? Kevin's answer was humble, pointing to user experience, the agent-first workflow, and the team’s dedication to building the best product. Check out our full conversation on the pod and download Windsurf for yourself: windsurf.aiVideo Models & Voice model updates There is so much happening in LLM world, that folks may skip over the other stuff, but there's so much happening in these world's as well this week! Here's a brief recap! * Alibaba's WanX: Open-sourced, cutting-edge video generation models making waves with over 250,000 downloads already. They claim to take SOTA on open source video generation evals and of course img2video of this high quality model will lead to ... folks using it for all kinds of things. * HUMEs Octave: A groundbreaking LLM model that genuinely understands context and emotion and does TTS. Blog Hume has been doing emotional TTS but with this TTS focused LLM we are now able to create voices with a prompt, and receive emotional responses that are inferred from the text. Think shyness, sarcasm, anger etc* 11labs’ Scribe: Beating Whisper 3 with impressive accuracy and diarization features, Scribe is raising the bar in speech-to-text quality. 11labs releasing their own ASR (automatic speech recognition) was not in my cards, and boy did they deliver. Beating whisper, with speaker separation (diarization), world level timestamps and much lower WER than other models, this is a very interesting entry to this space. However, free for now on their website, it's significantly slower than Gemini 2.0 and Whisper for me at least. * Sesame releases their conversational speech model (and promising to open source this) and it's honestly the best / least uncanny conversations I had with an AI. Check out my conversation with it * Lastly, VEO 2, the best video model around according to some, is finally available via API (though txt2video only) and it's fairly expensive, but gives some amazing results. You can try it out on FALPhew, it looks like we've made it! Huge huge week in AI, big 2 new models, tons of incredible updates on multimodality and voice as well 🔥If you enjoyed this summary, the best way to support us is to share with a friend (or 3) and give us a 5 start reviews on wherever you get your podcasts, it really does help! 👏 See you next week, Alex This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe

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• 📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!

  Holy moly, AI enthusiasts! Alex Volkov here, reporting live from the AI Engineer Summit in the heart of (touristy) Times Square, New York! This week has been an absolute whirlwind of announcements, from XAI's Grok 3 dropping like a bomb, to Figure robots learning to hand each other things, and even a little eval smack-talk between OpenAI and XAI. It’s enough to make your head spin – but that's what ThursdAI is here for. We sift through the chaos and bring you the need-to-know, so you can stay on the cutting edge without having to, well, spend your entire life glued to X and Reddit.This week we had a very special live show with the Haize Labs folks, the ones I previously interviewed about their bijection attacks, discussing their open source judge evaluation library called Verdict. So grab your favorite caffeinated beverage, maybe do some stretches because your mind will be blown, and let's dive into the TL;DR of ThursdAI, February 20th, 2025!Participants* Alex Volkov: AI Evangelist with Weights and Biases* Nisten: AI Engineer and cohost* Akshay: AI Community Member* Nuo: Dev Advocate at 01AI* Nimit: Member of Technical Staff at Haize Labs* Leonard: Co-founder at Haize LabsOpen Source LLMsPerplexity's R1 7076: Censorship-Free DeepSeekPerplexity made a bold move this week, releasing R1 7076, a fine-tuned version of DeepSeek R1 specifically designed to remove what they (and many others) perceive as Chinese government censorship. The name itself, 1776, is a nod to American independence – a pretty clear statement! The core idea? Give users access to information on topics the CCP typically restricts, like Tiananmen Square and Taiwanese independence.Perplexity used human experts to identify around 300 sensitive topics and built a "censorship classifier" to train the bias out of the model. The impressive part? They claim to have done this without significantly impacting the model's performance on standard evals. As Nuo from 01AI pointed out on the show, though, he'd "actually prefer that they can actually disclose more of their details in terms of post training... Running the R1 model by itself, it's already very difficult and very expensive." He raises a good point – more transparency is always welcome! Still, it's a fascinating attempt to tackle a tricky problem, the problem which I always say we simply cannot avoid. You can check it out yourself on Hugging Face and read their blog post.Arc Institute & NVIDIA Unveil Evo 2: Genomics PowerhouseGet ready for some serious science, folks! Arc Institute and NVIDIA dropped Evo 2, a massive genomics model (40 billion parameters!) trained on a mind-boggling 9.3 trillion nucleotides. And it’s fully open – two papers, weights, data, training, and inference codebases. We love to see it!Evo 2 uses the StripedHyena architecture to process huge genetic sequences (up to 1 million nucleotides!), allowing for analysis of complex genomic patterns. The practical applications? Predicting the effects of genetic mutations (super important for healthcare) and even designing entire genomes. I’ve been super excited about genomics models, and seeing these alternative architectures like StripedHyena getting used here is just icing on the cake. Check it out on X.ZeroBench: The "Impossible" Benchmark for VLLMsNeed more benchmarks? Always! A new benchmark called ZeroBench arrived, claiming to be the "impossible benchmark" for Vision Language Models (VLLMs). And guess what? All current top-of-the-line VLLMs get a big fat zero on it.One example they gave was a bunch of scattered letters, asking the model to "answer the question that is written in the shape of the star among the mess of letters." Honestly, even I struggled to see the star they were talking about. It highlights just how much further VLLMs need to go in terms of true visual understanding. (X, Page, Paper, HF)Hugging Face's Ultra Scale Playbook: Scaling UpFor those of you building massive models, Hugging Face released the Ultra Scale Playbook, a guide to building and scaling AI models on huge GPU clusters.They ran 4,000 scaling experiments on up to 512 GPUs (nothing close to Grok's 100,000, but still impressive!). If you're working in a lab and dreaming big, this is definitely a resource to check out. (HF).Big CO LLMs + APIsGrok 3: XAI's Big Swing new SOTA LLM! (and Maybe a Bug?)Monday evening, BOOM! While some of us were enjoying President's Day, the XAI team dropped Grok 3. They announced it with a setting very similar to OpenAI announcements. They're claiming state-of-the-art performance on some benchmarks (more on that drama later!), and a whopping 1 million token context window, finally confirmed after some initial confusion. They talked a lot about agents and a future of reasoners as well.The launch was a bit… messy. First, there was a bug where some users were getting Grok 2 even when the dropdown said Grok 3. That led to a lot of mixed reviews. Even when I finally thought I was using Grok 3, it still flubbed my go-to logic test, the "Beth's Ice Cubes" question. (The answer is zero, folks – ice cubes melt!). But Akshay, who joined us on the show, chimed in with some love: "...with just the base model of Grok 3, it's, in my opinion, it's the best coding model out there." So, mixed vibes, to say the least! It's also FREE for now, "until their GPUs melt," according to XAI, which is great.UPDATE: The vibes are shifting, more and more of my colleagues and mutuals are LOVING grok3 for one shot coding, for talking to it. I’m getting convinced as well, though I did use and will continue to use Grok for real time data and access to X. DeepSearchIn an attempt to show off some Agentic features, XAI also launched a deep search (not research like OpenAI but effectively the same) Now, XAI of course has access to X, which makes their deep search have a leg up, specifically for real time information! I found out it can even “use” the X search! OpenAI's Open Source TeaseIn what felt like a very conveniently timed move, Sam Altman dropped a poll on X the same day as the Grok announcement: if OpenAI were to open-source something, should it be a small, mobile-optimized model, or a model on par with o3-mini? Most of us chose o3 mini, just to have access to that model and play with it. No indication of when this might happen, but it’s a clear signal that OpenAI is feeling the pressure from the open-source community.The Eval Wars: OpenAI vs. XAIThings got spicy! There was a whole debate about the eval numbers XAI posted, specifically the "best of N" scores (like best of 64 runs). Boris from OpenAI, and Aiden mcLau called out some of the graphs. Folks on X were quick to point out that OpenAI also used "best of N" in the past, and the discussion devolved from there.XAI is claiming SOTA. OpenAI (or some folks from within OpenAI) aren't so sure. The core issue? We can't independently verify Grok's performance because there's no API yet! As I said, "…we're not actually able to use this model to independently evaluate this model and to tell you guys whether or not they actually told us the truth." Transparency matters, folks!DeepSearch - How Deep?Grok also touted a new "Deep Search" feature, kind of like Perplexity or OpenAI's "Deep Research" in their more expensive plan. My initial tests were… underwhelming. I nicknamed it "Shallow Search" because it spent all of 34 seconds on a complex query where OpenAI's Deep Research took 11 minutes and cited 17 sources. We're going to need to do some more digging (pun intended) on this one.This Week's BuzzWe’re leaning hard into agents at Weights & Biases! We just released an agents whitepaper (check it out on our socials!), and we're launching an agents course in collaboration with OpenAI's Ilan Biggio. Sign up at wandb.me/agents! We're hearing so much about agent evaluation and observability, and we're working hard to provide the tools the community needs.Also, sadly, our Toronto workshops are completely sold out. But if you're at AI Engineer in New York, come say hi to our booth! And catch my talk on LLM Reasoner Judges tomorrow (Friday) at 11 am EST – it’ll be live on the AI Engineer YouTube channel (HERE)!Vision & VideoMicrosoft MUSE: Playable Worlds from a Single ImageThis one is wild. Microsoft's MUSE can generate minutes of playable gameplay from just a single second of video frames and controller actions.It's based on the World and Human Action Model (WHAM) architecture, trained on a billion gameplay images from Xbox. So if you’ve been playing Xbox lately, you might be in the model! I found it particularly cool: "…you give it like a single second of a gameplay of any type of game with all the screen elements, with percentages, with health bars, with all of these things and their model generates a game that you can control." (X, HF, Blog).StepFun's Step-Video-T2V: State-of-the-Art (and Open Source!)We got two awesome open-source video breakthroughs this week. First, StepFun's Step-Video-T2V (and T2V Turbo), a 30 billion parameter text-to-video model. The results look really good, especially the text integration. Imagine a Chinese girl opening a scroll, and the words "We will open source" appearing as she unfurls it. That’s the kind of detail we're talking about.And it’s MIT licensed! As Nisten noted "This is pretty cool. It came out. Right before Sora came out, people would have lost their minds." (X, Paper, HF, Try It).HAO AI's FastVideo: Speeding Up HY-VideoThe second video highlight: HAO AI released FastVideo, a way to make HY-Video (already a strong open-source contender) three times faster with no additional training! They call the trick "Sliding Tile Attention" apparently that alone provides enormous boost compared to even flash attention.This is huge because faster inference means these models become more practical for real-world use. And, bonus: it supports HY-Video's Loras, meaning you can fine-tune it for, ahem, all kinds of creative applications. I will not go as far as to mention civit ai. (Github)Figure's Helix: Robot Collaboration!Breaking news from the AI Engineer conference floor: Figure, the humanoid robot company, announced Helix, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model built into their robots!It has full upper body control!What blew my mind: they showed two robots working together, handing objects to each other, based on natural language commands! As I watched, I exclaimed, "I haven't seen a humanoid robot, hand off stuff to the other one... I found it like super futuristically cool." The model runs on the robot, using a 7 billion parameter VLM for understanding and an 80 million parameter transformer for control. This is the future, folks!Tools & OthersMicrosoft's New Quantum Chip (and State of Matter!)Microsoft announced a new quantum chip and a new state of matter (called "topological superconductivity"). "I found it like absolutely mind blowing that they announced something like this," I gushed on the show. While I'm no quantum physicist, this sounds like a big deal for the future of computing.Verdict: Hayes Labs' Framework for LLM JudgesAnd of course, the highlight of our show: Verdict, a new open-source framework from Hayes Labs (the folks behind those "bijection" jailbreaks!) for composing LLM judges. This is a huge deal for anyone working on evaluation. Leonard and Nimit from Hayes Labs joined us to explain how Verdict addresses some of the core problems with LLM-as-a-judge: biases (like preferring their own responses!), sensitivity to prompts, and the challenge of "meta-evaluation" (how do you know your judge is actually good?).Verdict lets you combine different judging techniques ("primitives") to create more robust and efficient evaluators. Think of it as "judge-time compute scaling," as Leonard called it. They're achieving near state-of-the-art results on benchmarks like ExpertQA, and it's designed to be fast enough to use as a guardrail in real-time applications!One key insight: you don't always need a full-blown reasoning model for judging. As Nimit explained, Verdict can combine simpler LLM calls to achieve similar results at a fraction of the cost. And, it's open source! (Paper, Github,X).ConclusionAnother week, another explosion of AI breakthroughs! Here are my key takeaways:* Open Source is THRIVING: From censorship-free LLMs to cutting-edge video models, the open-source community is delivering incredible innovation.* The Need for Speed (and Efficiency): Whether it's faster video generation or more efficient LLM judging, performance is key.* Robots are Getting Smarter (and More Collaborative): Figure's Helix is a glimpse into a future where robots work together.* Evaluation is (Finally) Getting Attention: Tools like Verdict are essential for building reliable and trustworthy AI systems.* The Big Players are Feeling the Heat: OpenAI's open-source tease and XAI's rapid progress show that the competition is fierce.I'll be back in my usual setup next week, ready to break down all the latest AI news. Stay tuned to ThursdAI – and don't forget to give the pod five stars and subscribe to the newsletter for all the links and deeper dives. There’s potentially an Anthropic announcement coming, so we’ll see you all next week.TLDR* Open Source LLMs* Perplexity R1 1776 - finetune of china-less R1 (Blog, Model)* Arc institute + Nvidia - introduce EVO 2 - genomics model (X)* ZeroBench - impossible benchmark for VLMs (X, Page, Paper, HF)* HuggingFace ultra scale playbook (HF)* Big CO LLMs + APIs* Grok 3 SOTA LLM + reasoning and Deep Search (blog, try it)* OpenAI is about to open source something? Sam posts a polls* This weeks Buzz* We are about to launch an agents course! Pre-sign up wandb.me/agents* Workshops are SOLD OUT* Watch my talk LIVE from AI Engineer - 11am EST Friday (HERE)* Keep watching AI Eng conference after the show on AIE YT* )* Vision & Video* Microsoft MUSE - playable worlds from one image (X, HF, Blog)* Microsoft OmniParser - Better, faster screen parsing for GUI agents with OmniParser v2 (Gradio Demo)* HAO AI - fastVIDEO - making HY-Video 3x as fast (Github)* StepFun - Step-Video-T2V (+Turbo), a SotA 30B text-to-video model (Paper, Github, HF, Try It)* Figure announces HELIX - vision action model built into FIGURE Robot (Paper)* Tools & Others* Microsoft announces a new quantum chip and a new state of matter (Blog, X)* Verdict - Framework to compose SOTA LLM judges with JudgeTime Scaling (Paper, Github,X) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe

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