San Francisco-based AI startup Deep Cogito has released five AI models in preview, making them available under an open-source license agreement. The models come in sizes 3B, 8B, 14B, 32B and 70B, with plans to release 109B, 400B and 671B versions in the weeks and months ahead. As for the current models, “each outperforms the best available open models of the same size, including counterparts from Meta, DeepSeek and Alibaba, across most standard benchmarks,” Deep Cogito claims, noting that the 70B model in particular “outperforms the newly released Llama 4 109B MoE model.” Continue reading Deep Cogito Is Out of Stealth with Hybrid Reasoning Models

Sentient, a year-old non-profit backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, has released Open Deep Search (ODS), an open-source framework that leverages existing LLMs to enhance search and reasoning capabilities. Essentially a system of custom plugins and tools, ODS works with DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model as well as proprietary systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude to deliver advanced search functionality. That modular aspect is in fact ODS’s main innovation, its creators say, claiming it beats Perplexity and OpenAI’s GPT-4o Search Preview on benchmarks for accuracy and transparency. Continue reading Non-Profit Sentient Launches New ‘Open Deep Search’ Model

Alibaba Cloud has released Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, a new AI model the company claims is efficient enough to run on edge devices like mobile phones and laptops. Boasting a relatively light 7-billion parameter footprint, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B understands text, images, audio and video and generates real-time responses in text and natural speech. Alibaba says its combination of compact size and multimodal capabilities is “unique,” offering “the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that deliver tangible value, especially intelligent voice applications.” One example would be using a phone’s camera to help a vision impaired-person navigate their environment. Continue reading Alibaba’s Powerful Multimodal Qwen Model Is Built for Mobile

San Mateo, California-based game developer Roblox has released a 3D object generator called Cube 3D, the first of several models the company plans to make available. Cube currently generates 3D models and environments from text, and in the future the company plans to add image inputs. Roblox says it is open-sourcing the tool, making it available to users on and off the platform. Cube will serve as the core generative AI system for Roblox’s 3D and 4D plans, the latter referring to interactive responsiveness. The launch coincides with the Game Developers Conference, running through Friday in San Francisco. Continue reading Roblox Reveals Its Generative AI System Cube for 3D and 4D

Alibaba Group has revamped its Quark search engine as an AI “super assistant” powered by its flagship Qwen reasoning model. Quark had previously relied on a model called QuarkLLM. The new iteration features a chatbot, deep thinking and agentic capability, Alibaba says. The company also debuted R1-Omni, a model it says has emotional intelligence. Included in the flurry of Alibaba news: a strategic partnership with Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, the company behind the new AI agent Manus. The moves are part of a surge of Chinese AI tech coming to market as the country asserts itself in the space. Continue reading Alibaba Updates Quark, Debuts R1-Omni, Secures Manus Pact

Alibaba is making AI news again, releasing another Qwen reasoning model, QwQ-32B, which was trained and scaled using reinforcement learning (RL). The Qwen team says it “has the potential to enhance model performance beyond conventional pretraining and post-training methods.” QwQ-32B, a 32 billion parameter model, “achieves performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1, which boasts 671 billion parameters (with 37 billion activated),” Alibaba claims. While parameters refer to the total set of adjustable weights and biases in the model’s neural network, “activated” parameters are a subset used for a specific inference task, like generating a response. Continue reading Alibaba Says Qwen Reasoning Model on Par with DeepSeek

Sesame, an AI startup from Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, has created a conversational voice model that many feel has achieved uncanny levels of authenticity. Drawing comparisons to the charismatic vocal centerpiece of the 2013 Warner Bros. film “Her,” Sesame seems to have achieved a new level of engagement among AI voice assistants. While some are describing the tech as “amazing.” others have expressed concern over its capabilities. “Our goal is to achieve ‘voice presence’ — the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood and valued,” explains a blog post by Iribe and others. Continue reading AI Startup Sesame Develops Next Stage of Voice Generation

Alibaba has open-sourced its Wan 2.1 video- and image-generating AI models, heating up an already competitive space. The Wan 2.1 family, which has four models, is said to produce “highly realistic” images and videos from text and images. The company has since December been previewing a new reasoning model, QwQ-Max, indicating it will be open-sourced when fully released. The move comes after another Chinese AI company, DeepSeek, released its R1 reasoning model for free download and use, triggering demand for more open-source artificial intelligence. Continue reading Highly Realistic Alibaba GenVid Models Are Available for Free

Barely two weeks after the launch of its OmniHuman-1 AI model, ByteDance has released Goku, a new artificial intelligence designed to create photorealistic video featuring humanoid actors. Goku uses text prompts to create among other things, realistic product videos without the need for human actors. This last is a boon for ByteDance social media unit TikTok. Goku is open source, trained on a large dataset of roughly 36 million video-text pairs and 160 million image-text pairs. Goku’s debut is received as more bad news for OpenAI in the form of added competition, but a positive step for global enterprise. Continue reading ByteDance’s Goku Video Model Is Latest in Chinese AI Streak

OpenAI has decided to simplify its product offerings. A month after announcing the in-development GPT-o3 as its next frontier model, the company has canceled it as a standalone release, explaining that it would be integrated into the upcoming GPT-5 instead. “A top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman wrote in a social media post this week. Expected to ship later this year, the GPT-5 models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research and more, OpenAI says. Continue reading Sam Altman Reveals Plans to Simplify OpenAI’s Product Line

Anthropic is launching an AI Economic Index aimed at understanding the technology’s effects on labor markets and the economy over time. The Anthropic Economic Index kicks off with a report that indicates the most concentrated uses of AI today are in software development and technical writing tasks. The information was culled by analyzing data from millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai with the goal of revealing how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across global markets. It also found that AI usage trends more toward augmenting human capabilities (57 percent), compared to using it for automation (43 percent). Continue reading Anthropic Launches Economic Index to Track the AI Economy

Meta is seeking to make AI more inclusive with a program to support underserved languages “and help bring their speakers into the digital conversation.” Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) unit has teamed with UNESCO to launch the Language Technology Partner Program, which is looking for people who can provide more than 10 hours of speech recordings (with transcriptions) and chunks of written text (200+ sentences, with translation) in diverse languages. “Partners will work with our teams to help integrate these languages into AI-driven speech recognition and machine translation models, which when released will be open sourced,” Meta said. Continue reading Meta Adds Indigenous Languages to Speech and Translation AI

Most people know Hugging Face as a resource-sharing community, but it also builds open-source applications and tools for machine learning. Its recent release of vision-language models small enough to run on smartphones while outperforming competitors that rely on massive data centers is being hailed as “a remarkable breakthrough in AI.”  The new models — SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M — are optimized for “constrained devices” with less than around 1GB of RAM, making them ideal for mobile devices including laptops and also convenient for those interested in processing large amounts of data cheaply and with a low-energy footprint. Continue reading Hugging Face Has Developed Tiny Yet Powerful Vision Models

Jack Dorsey’s financial tech and media firm Block (formerly Square) has released a platform for building AI agents: Codename Goose. Previously available in beta, Goose is primarily designed to build agents for coding and software development, but Block built in many basic features that could be applied to general purpose pursuits. Because it is open source and offered under Apache License 2.0, the hope is that developers will apply it to varied use cases. A leading feature of Codename Goose is its flexibility. It can integrate a wide range of large language models, letting developers use it with their preferred model. Continue reading Codename Goose: Block Unveils Open-Source AI Agent Builder

Meta is rolling out personalization updates to its Meta AI personal assistant. At the end of last year, the company introduced a feature that lets Meta AI remember what you’ve shared with it in one-on-one chats on WhatsApp and Messenger so it could produce more relevant responses. That feature will now be available to Meta AI on Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp for iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada. “Meta AI will only remember certain things you tell it in 1:1 conversations (not group chats), and you can delete its memories at any time,” explains the company. Continue reading Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Get Meta AI Memory Boost