Alibaba Cloud has released the latest entry in its growing Qwen family of large language models. The new Qwen with Questions (QwQ) is an open-source competitor to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model. As with competing large reasoning models (LRMs), QwQ can correct its own mistakes, relying on extra compute cycles during inference to assess its responses, making it well suited for reasoning tasks like math and coding. Described as an “experimental research model,” this preview version of QwQ has 32-billion-parameters and a 32,000-token context, leading to speculation that a more powerful iteration is in the offing. Read more

Amazon Web Services has opened AWS Data Transfer Terminals in Los Angeles and New York. These secure physical locations allow customers to bring their storage devices for fast uploads to the AWS Cloud. The enterprise service can significantly reduce data ingestion time for use cases including uploads of “large datasets from fleets of vehicles collecting data in metro areas for training machine learning models” as well as “digital audio and video files from content creators for media processing workloads” and local government organizations compiling geographical and other smart city data. Read more

German media company Bertelsmann has partnered with AI startup ElevenLabs on an effort to drive tech innovation and workflow across Bertelsmann production, marketing and distribution. Bertelsmann operations span roughly 50 countries with businesses including the publisher Penguin Random House, record label BMG and the RTL Group television unit. The objective is for ElevenLabs tools in voice and audio generation to help Bertelsmann expand productivity and reach. In August, New York-based ElevenLabs opened a European headquarters in London, expanding its international footprint for text-to-speech and other audio apps. Read more

Couchbase, the publicly traded data platform for developers, has launched Capella AI Services with the aim of simplifying the process of developing and deploying agentic AI apps for enterprise clients. Capella AI joins the company’s flagship Couchbase Capella cloud data platform. AI offerings include model hosting, automated vectorization, unstructured data preprocessing and AI agent catalog services. Couchbase’s goal is to “allow organizations to prototype, build, test and deploy AI agents” while giving developers control over data across the development lifecycle, including secure data mitigation for large language models running outside the organization. Read more

Anticipating what one outlet calls “the likely imminent release of OpenAI’s Sora,” generative AI video competitors are compelled to step up their game. Luma AI has released a major upgrade to its Dream Machine, speeding its already quick video generation and enabling a chat function for natural language prompts, so you can talk to it as with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In addition to the new interface, Dream Machine is going mobile and adding a new foundation image model, Luma AI Photon, which “has been purpose built to advance the power and capabilities of Dream Machine,” according to the company. Read more