What Matters in AI Right Now

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Blue performance gauge with needle pointing to maximum, indicating high level or peak performance.

May 7, 2025

ChatGPT Grovels, Qwen3 Takes on DeepSeek-R1, Johnson & Johnson Reveals AI Strategy, Easy Reasoning Hack

The Batch AI News and Insights: I’m delighted to announce that AI Fund has closed $190M for our new fund, in an oversubscribed round.

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

Bar chart comparing accuracy and percentile scores of DeepSeek models and OpenAI models across benchmarks.

DeepSeek Sharpens Its Reasoning: DeepSeek-R1, an affordable rival to OpenAI’s o1

Two colleagues discuss their chatbot’s success; one suggests hiring an AI Product Manager.

Tumbling Training Costs, Desktop AI Supercomputer, Tighter AI Export Restrictions, Improved Contrastive Loss

Basketball 3-point shooting chart with AI-generated student portraits and stats for volume and accuracy.

Apr 30, 2025

OpenAI’s Hit Image Generator, Hot AI Startups, Better Recommendations, Music Generation for Pros

The Batch AI News and Insights: I hope we can empower everyone to build with AI.

Code snippet showing ‘Keep Building!’ printed in multiple programming languages including Python, Java, JavaScript, and C++.

Apr 23, 2025

OpenAI’s Five New Models, Hugging Face’s Open Robot, U.S. Tightens Grip on AI Chips, Text-Only LLMs Go Multimodal

The Batch AI News and Insights: Even though I’m a much better Python than JavaScript developer, with AI assistance, I’ve been writing a lot of JavaScript code recently.

Cartoon of two coworkers coding; one struggles with evaluations, the other iterates quickly through model updates and test cases.

Apr 16, 2025

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5, MCP Gains Momentum, Behind Sam Altman’s Fall and Rise, LLMs That Understand Misspellings

The Batch AI News and Insights: I’ve noticed that many GenAI application projects put in automated evaluations (evals) of the system’s output probably later — and rely on humans to manually examine and judge outputs longer — than they should.

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

Apr 09, 2025

Inside the Mind of Claude, Llama 4’s Mixture of Vision-Language Experts, More Open Multimodal Models, Neural Net for Tabular Data

The Batch AI News and Insights: I am so sorry that the U.S. is letting down our friends and allies.

Cartoon of a relaxed man saying “Relax! I’m lazy prompting!” while lounging under a beach umbrella near a stressed coworker at a desk.

Apr 02, 2025

Open Voice-to-Voice With Vision, ChatGPT Creates Emotional Bonds, Human Action in 3D, Web Scrapers Caught in Maze

The Batch AI News and Insights: Contrary to standard prompting advice that you should give LLMs the context they need to succeed, I find it’s sometimes faster to be lazy and dash off a quick, imprecise prompt and see what happens.

Cartoon of a man playing violin saying “I’m fine-tuning!” while a woman at her desk covers her ears, replying “Did you try prompting?”

Mar 26, 2025

Compact Vision-Language with Open Weights, Faster Learning, Diffusion in Few Steps, LLMs Aid Tutors

The Batch AI News and Insights: Fine-tuning small language models has been gaining traction over the past half year.

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

Mar 19, 2025

Inside Google’s Co-Scientist, Copyright Office Weighs Generated Works, Multilingual (and Good at All of Them), Diffusion for Materials Design

The Batch AI News and Insights: Last Friday on Pi Day, we held AI Dev 25, a new conference for AI Developers.

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

Mar 12, 2025

DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored, QwQ-32B Puts Reasoning in Smaller Model, Phi-4-multimodal Takes Spoken Input, Training AI May Not Be Fair Use

The Batch AI News and Insights: Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.

Diagram of an RQ-Transformer speech system with Helium and Depth Transformers for audio processing.

Mar 05, 2025

GPT-4.5 Goes Big, Claude 3.7 Reasons, Alexa+ Goes Agentic, Generating Text Like an Image

The Batch AI News and Insights: Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.

Diagram comparing direct audio generation with a foundation model vs. a voice pipeline using STT, LLM, and TTS.

Feb 26, 2025

Meta Reads Minds, Big AI Spending Climbs, Deepfakes Appropriate Celeb Likenesses, Reasoning in Vectors

The Batch AI News and Insights: The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications.

Thermal aerial image showing a suspect surrendering with hands raised. A marker highlights their location.

Feb 19, 2025

Grok 3 Scales Up, Mobile Apps Generated To Order, Musk Moves On OpenAI, Officials Reverse Course on AI Regulation

The Batch AI News and Insights: Last month, a drone from Skyfire AI was credited with saving a police officer’s life after a dramatic 2 a.m. traffic stop.

“Responsible AI” written on a wall, with “Safety” crossed out in blue paint.

Feb 12, 2025

OpenAI Does Deep Research, Google Goes to War, Alibaba Answers DeepSeek, Web Agents Do Tree Search

The Batch AI News and Insights: At the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris this week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said, “I’m not here to talk about AI safety.

Comic-style illustration of a confident woman and man standing beside bold ‘10X’ text on a bright background.

Feb 05, 2025

o3-mini Puts Reasoning in High Gear, How to Train for Computer Use, Gemini 2.0 Thinks Faster, More-Responsive Voice Interactions

The Batch AI News and Insights: A “10x engineer” — a widely accepted concept in tech — purportedly has 10 times the impact of the average engineer.

Jan 29, 2025

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

The Batch AI News and Insights: The buzz over DeepSeek this week crystallized, for many people, a few important trends that have been happening in plain sight.

Global temperature change map and graph comparing scenarios with and without SAI intervention.

Jan 22, 2025

DeepSeek’s Open Reasoning Model, Affordable Humanoid Robots, Texas’ Restrictive AI Law, GenAI for Electronics

The Batch AI News and Insights: Greetings from Davos, Switzerland! Many business and government leaders are gathered here again for the annual World Economic Forum to discuss tech, climate, geopolitics, and economic growth.

What Matters in AI Right Now

ChatGPT Grovels, Qwen3 Takes on DeepSeek-R1, Johnson & Johnson Reveals AI Strategy, Easy Reasoning Hack

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

DeepSeek Sharpens Its Reasoning: DeepSeek-R1, an affordable rival to OpenAI’s o1

Tumbling Training Costs, Desktop AI Supercomputer, Tighter AI Export Restrictions, Improved Contrastive Loss

OpenAI’s Hit Image Generator, Hot AI Startups, Better Recommendations, Music Generation for Pros

OpenAI’s Five New Models, Hugging Face’s Open Robot, U.S. Tightens Grip on AI Chips, Text-Only LLMs Go Multimodal

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5, MCP Gains Momentum, Behind Sam Altman’s Fall and Rise, LLMs That Understand Misspellings

Inside the Mind of Claude, Llama 4’s Mixture of Vision-Language Experts, More Open Multimodal Models, Neural Net for Tabular Data

Open Voice-to-Voice With Vision, ChatGPT Creates Emotional Bonds, Human Action in 3D, Web Scrapers Caught in Maze

Compact Vision-Language with Open Weights, Faster Learning, Diffusion in Few Steps, LLMs Aid Tutors

Inside Google’s Co-Scientist, Copyright Office Weighs Generated Works, Multilingual (and Good at All of Them), Diffusion for Materials Design

DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored, QwQ-32B Puts Reasoning in Smaller Model, Phi-4-multimodal Takes Spoken Input, Training AI May Not Be Fair Use

GPT-4.5 Goes Big, Claude 3.7 Reasons, Alexa+ Goes Agentic, Generating Text Like an Image

Meta Reads Minds, Big AI Spending Climbs, Deepfakes Appropriate Celeb Likenesses, Reasoning in Vectors

Grok 3 Scales Up, Mobile Apps Generated To Order, Musk Moves On OpenAI, Officials Reverse Course on AI Regulation

OpenAI Does Deep Research, Google Goes to War, Alibaba Answers DeepSeek, Web Agents Do Tree Search

o3-mini Puts Reasoning in High Gear, How to Train for Computer Use, Gemini 2.0 Thinks Faster, More-Responsive Voice Interactions

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

DeepSeek’s Open Reasoning Model, Affordable Humanoid Robots, Texas’ Restrictive AI Law, GenAI for Electronics

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