Nvidia has debuted a new AI model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, that it claims is outperforming competitors GPT-4o from OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The impressive showing has prompted speculation of an AI shakeup and a significant shift in Nividia’s AI strategy, which has thus far been focused primarily on chipmaking. The model was quietly released on Hugging Face, and Nvidia says as of October 1 it ranked first on three top automatic alignment benchmarks, “edging out strong frontier models” and vaulting Nvidia to the forefront of the LLM field in areas like comprehension, context and generation. Continue reading Nvidia’s Impressive AI Model Could Compete with Top Brands

OpenAI has announced Swarm, an experimental framework that coordinates networks of AI agents, and true to its name the news has kicked over a hornet’s nest of contentious debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence and the future of enterprise automation. OpenAI emphasizes that Swarm is not an official product and says though it has shared the code publicly it has no intention of maintaining it. “Think of it more like a cookbook,” OpenAI engineer Shyamal Anadkat said in a social media post, calling it “code for building simple agents.” Continue reading OpenAI Tests Open-Source Framework for Autonomous Agents

Apple has released a new AI model called Depth Pro that can create a 3D depth map from a 2D image in under a second. The system is being hailed as a breakthrough that could potentially revolutionize how machines perceive depth, with transformative impact on industries from augmented reality to self-driving vehicles. “The predictions are metric, with absolute scale” without relying on the camera metadata typically required for such mapping, according to Apple. Using a consumer-grade GPU, the model can produce a 2.25-megapixel depth map using a single image in only 0.3 seconds. Continue reading Apple Advances Computer Vision with Its Depth Pro AI Model

Nvidia has unveiled the NVLM 1.0 family of multimodal LLMs, a powerful open-source AI that the company says performs comparably to proprietary systems from OpenAI and Google. Led by NVLM-D-72B, with 72 billion parameters, Nvidia’s new entry in the AI race achieved what the company describes as “state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models.” Nvidia has made the model weights publicly available and says it will also be releasing the training code, a break from the closed approach of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Continue reading Nvidia Releases Open-Source Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMs

The Allen Institute for AI (also known as Ai2, founded by Paul Allen and led by Ali Farhadi) has launched Molmo, a family of four open-source multimodal models. While advanced models “can perceive the world and communicate with us, Molmo goes beyond that to enable one to act in their worlds, unlocking a whole new generation of capabilities, everything from sophisticated web agents to robotics,” according to Ai2. On some third-party benchmark tests, Molmo’s 72 billion parameter model outperforms other open AI offerings and “performs favorably” against proprietary rivals like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 1.5 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Ai2 says. Continue reading Allen Institute Announces Vision-Optimized Molmo AI Models

Meta’s Llama 3.2 release includes two new multimodal LLMs, one with 11 billion parameters and one with 90 billion — considered small- and medium-sized — and two lightweight, text-only models (1B and 3B) that fit onto edge and mobile devices. Included are pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions. In addition to text, the multimodal models can interpret images, supporting apps that require visual understanding. Meta says the models are free and open source. Alongside them, the company is releasing “the first official Llama Stack distributions,” enabling “turnkey deployment” with integrated safety. Continue reading Meta Unveils New Open-Source Multimodal Model Llama 3.2

Alibaba Cloud last week globally released more than 100 new open-source variants of its large language foundation model, Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community. The company has also revamped its proprietary offering as a full-stack AI-computing infrastructure across cloud products, networking and data center architecture, all aimed at supporting the growing demands of AI computing. Alibaba Cloud’s significant contribution was revealed at the Apsara Conference, the annual flagship event held by the cloud division of China’s e-retail giant, often referred to as the Chinese Amazon. Continue reading Alibaba Cloud Ups Its AI Game with 100 Open-Source Models

Amazon is transferring its OpenSearch platform to the Linux Foundation’s new OpenSearch Software Foundation. By handing a third-party the open-source project it has developed internally since 2021, Amazon hopes to accelerate collaboration in data-driven search and analytics, an area of focus due to the proliferation of model training. Not to be confused with commercial search (Google, Bing), engines like OpenSearch are geared toward enterprise and academia. Because it is licensed under Apache 2.0, OpenSearch is a viable starting point for organizations that customize internal platforms for searching, monitoring and analyzing large volumes of data. Continue reading AWS Transfers OpenSearch Stewardship to Linux Foundation

OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who exited the company in May after a power struggle with CEO Sam Altman, has raised $1 billion for his new venture, Safe Superintelligence (SSI). The cash infusion from major Silicon Valley venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel and NFDG has resulted in a $5 billion valuation for the startup. As its name implies, SSI is focused on developing artificial intelligence that does not pose a threat to humanity, a goal that will be pursued “in a straight shot” with “one product,” Sutskever has stated. Continue reading Safe Superintelligence Raises $1 Billion to Develop Ethical AI

China’s largest cloud computing company, Alibaba Cloud, has released a new computer vision model, Qwen2-VL, which the company says improves on its predecessor in visual understanding, including video comprehension and text-to-image processing in languages including English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese and others. The company says it can analyze videos of more than 20 minutes in length and is able to respond appropriately to questions about content. Third-party benchmark tests compare Qwen2-VL favorably to leading competitors and the company is releasing two open-source versions with a larger private model to come. Continue reading Alibaba’s Latest Vision Model Has Advanced Video Capability

Creating a universal definition of “open source AI” has generated a fair amount of debate and confusion, with many outfits using elastic parameters in order to achieve a fit. Now the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — “the authority that defines Open Source” — has issued what it hopes will become the baseline definition. That definition, which includes the ability to “use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission,” excludes a lot of AI platforms that currently describe themselves as “open,” many freely available only for non-commercial use. OSI’s remaining three parameters involve the ability to inspect the system and modify and share it. Continue reading OSI Aims for Industry Standard by Defining ‘Open Source AI’

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek have joined forces to express displeasure with the European Union’s regulations on artificial intelligence, claiming they are suppressing innovation. That is the opposite of the stated goals of EU lawmakers in passing the regulations. In a joint statement first published in The Economist and then on the Meta and Spotify websites Friday, the duo took aim at alleged EU obstruction to the development of open source AI, suggesting that Europe’s “fragmented regulatory structure, riddled with inconsistent implementation, is hampering innovation and holding back developers.” Continue reading Meta, Spotify Issue Statement Criticizing EU’s AI Regulations

Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, the latest generative chatbots from Elon Musk’s xAI, create images with seemingly few guardrails. Early pictures of notable personalities such as Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in questionable or compromising settings may not appear photorealistic to a trained eye, but they are still described in many cases to be quite realistic. Powered by the FLUX.1 AI model from Black Forest Labs, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are available in beta on X social for Premium and Premium+ subscribers and will be coming to xAI’s enterprise API later this month, according to the company. Continue reading xAI’s Grok-2 Generates Realistic Images with Few Guardrails

VFusion3D is the latest AI model unveiled by Meta Platforms, which developed it in conjunction with the University of Oxford. The powerful model, which uses single-perspective images or text prompts to generate high-quality 3D objects, is being hailed as a breakthrough in scalable 3D AI that can potentially transform sectors including VR, gaming and digital design. The platform tackles the challenge of scarce 3D training data in a world teeming with 2D images and text descriptions. The VFusion3D approach leverages what the developers call “a novel method for building scalable 3D generative models utilizing pre-trained video diffusion models.” Continue reading Meta, Oxford Advance 3D Object Generation with VFusion3D

Google has unveiled three additions to its Gemma 2 family of compact yet powerful open-source AI models, emphasizing safety and transparency. The company’s Gemma 2 2B is a 2.6 billion parameter update to the lightweight 2B parameter Gemma 2, with built-in improvements in safety and performance. Built on Gemma 2, ShieldGemma is a suite of safety content classifier models that “filter the input and outputs of AI models and keep the user safe.” Interoperability model tool Gemma Scope offers what Google calls “unparalleled insight into our models’ inner workings.” Continue reading Latest Gemma 2 Models Emphasize Security and Performance